maybe duped items got imbued and became perm. Getting the items to roll with godly stats the character has to be at a very high level like 93+.
I'm guessing that they knew how to exploit the unlimited imbue quests. Only people that know d2lord the most is their creators
diadems do not require a high lvl char. neither to imbue nor to reroll with p skulls.
that's why diadems were the first items for sale. everyone cried IMPORT, but tbh there was no need. either get an army of bots to farm skulls, or just rollback imbues, or dupe skulls (no item id, wont poof).
they automated it and made crazy diadems.
there was several months, maybe even a year, inbetween when they sold diadems and when they started to sell eth/rep items and custom orders. probably because they used all the cash they made selling diadems to buy someone's import method, or a more calculated method to rollback imbue rares (rares can be skull rolled or they'll turn non-eth).
imports are real, but tbh people think they're more common than they were in d2lod.