"Drupal way" is to collaborate, not compete. It means that anyone wanting to write his own cloning solution will be asked to cooperate with author of existing one to provide what he finds lacking. Only if that's not possible, and some basic differences in approach or expected results are found, community will welcome new module. Otherwise it'll just die silently, unloved.

That said, you can use node exporting and importing tools to export nodes, edit them or not and import again, possibly under new nid. Node export is example of modules that can do that. Probably there are other ways to get content duplicated, and if you can think of basically different scenario, there is a big chance someone got that implemented.

Drupal 7 - Node Clone Alternatives
The monk in D&amp;D 3.5 (and, to a lesser extent, in Pathfinder) is generally considered underpowered. 

Would adding magic 'weapons' that could add enhancement bonuses and magic weapon effects to a monk's unarmed strikes be sufficient to re-balance them? Would they then be over-balanced?

To be specific I'm thinking of something like hand wraps that are a zero-cost weapon having no mundane effect on combat (the wielder counts as unarmed) but  that can be enchanted in the same way and at the same cost as a normal magic weapon.

Update: 

Thanks to @mxyzplk, I see that Gauntlets would effectively fulfill this effect. Odd that I haven't seen this in any of the discussions on monk optimisation!

Regarding assessing balance, I'll judge this based on how well it addresses the issues in @KRyan's answer in the above-linked question. Obviously if anyone doesn't agree with his analysis then this question is moot, although I would like to see those competing opinions.
