Ripper bug has been fixed. I know it's a rather lengthy read, but I'd encourage you to check out the readme on the submission page to see a list of bugs we found and fixed. Anything that hasn't been fixed, but has been found, is listed on the first post of this thread. If you discover anything not covered there, please post about it here so we can document it. I'm really happy at the sheer number of bugs we found that weren't even documented prior to this project, and that the majority of them were fixed.

@abw: I pulled up the old PPSSPP again and rushed on a new game to Poft. The boat stays at Paloom if you haven't paid for a trip, and if you talk to the guy in Poft who usually sells you a boat ticket, he simply says the following.

If you pay for a ride and then talk to the NPC again, you get the following message:

Meanwhile, in the NES version, even if you just bought a ticket the NPC will continue to prompt you and take money from you ad infinitum. There's absolutely 0 check for whether you've bought a ticket or not, even though there has to be some sort of variable or flag set that allows you to board the boat in the first place. I think that this is bit higher on the priority list, so I'm going to move it up on the first post.
I think it's safe to assume this works vice versa, which means that adding another message, or simply not taking the player's money, would be the "official" bug fix solution here. From a design standpoint, I think that this is a TERRIBLE approach, as it does indeed suggest that you're the only people in the game world using the boat (immersion break much?), but my perspective doesn't change the fact that this is the official remake behavior. Your current implementation for Restored works fine since it's a Quality of Life improvement patch, but we should think about how we could work room for another message or two into the lookup table for Bug Fix. Though since I doubt it takes the "already bought the ticket" situation into account, maybe we should roll back that change and think of something that works for both.
As for the dual-wielding, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how the combat in the remake differs. With fully maxed out characters end game, Leon wielding Masamune and an Aegis Shield is getting 31 hits, god knows how. Meanwhile, when making him dual-wield, he does 15 hits, the damage is displayed, then another 15 hits, and that damage is displayed. So at the very least that's how the remake handles dual-wielding. I'd probably ignore the 31-hits thing. Guy also got 23 hits, so I have no idea what's happening with all the single-wield + shields.
EDIT: Further testing reveals that removing a shield seems to drop these characters from up to 32 hits down to up to 16, so in remakes they clearly added some incentive to having shields equipped beyond evasion. That can be ignored for our purposes. Barehanded, despite "doubling" EXP gain in our version, only does up to 16 hits in the remake. Essentially the offhand is considered as "empty" regardless what's in the main hand. So in the remakes, you're either dual-wielding for two separate sets of hits, probably for strategic purposes like making use of two different leveled weapon skills or their effects, or just due to limited availability of "strongest" items, while using a shield essentially doubles the offensive power of your main hand weapon while giving you an evasion boost. This second benefit seems counterintuitive and like a "casual-friendly" design choice, so again, it can be ignored for our purposes. Choosing defense over offense is a good choice for the original to put on the player, though currently that benefit doesn't exist for dual-wielding and shields only provide a spell success penalty.