Um, this all looks wonderful, but I can't help feeling the horse is looking at the cart...
You can build the prettiest Age ever, with the most intricate and challenging puzzles, but the question no-one seems to be considering is why would anyone go there? Before you build the Age, surely you need to design the story that drives it, the reason for explorers to unravel it. Maybe, if there were a Guild of Historians, there could be a stockpile of storylines that could be "claimed" by builders who feel they could do them justice.
The obvious one that springs to mind is: a D'ni survivor in Releeshahn contacts an explorer and asks her to find his daughter. She is almost certainly trapped on an unexplored Age without a Linking Book to come back, and almost all the Linking Books to that Age have been lost or destroyed, except for one which may still exist on another unexplored Age...
I'm sure people can come up with far more interesting plots than that (at least I hope so) but the point is that you need a plot of some sort. Big revelations about the D'ni are probably out, so the focus would be on small stories about individuals, but with worthwhile and satisfying goals to attain. "Ooh, look at that!" is good, but it'll only take you so far.
Sorry if all this has been discussed somewhere else, but I couldn't see it anywhere so I thought I'd better stick my oar in...