Well figure I can finally talk about this division, having spent upwards of <900 hours on a towny server, Like Narwhal said, would definitely recommend mcmmo, even though at MUCH higher levels in it it can kind of ruin the economy.. (getting diamonds and stuff from excavation, etc,) And by sign economy you mean a server shop, I could probably help set that up if its decided to get one implemented.
Also for those saying get factions over towny, in a SENSE its kind of the same thing, but not really. Essentially you can take over any town you'd like depending on how many people you have in your town, so the more people the better. I'm also not sure how I feel about having pvp enabled everywhere outside of towns but we will see. Uhhh idk what else to say, feel free to ask questions though I guess.
Just as a few sidenotes, I haven't read really any of this thread aside from a few small parts yet so idk what plugins are going on the server, but if you need any help finding plugins or whatnot I would be happy to help! OH ALSO, idk if you guys know already, but there are some plugins out there that allow you to add more than one world to the server, so you could have the towny/faction map and then have the skyfactory or whatever which doesn't take a whole lot to set up.