I'm fairly certain that in Book of D'ni during the massive Book Search they also cleaned up the bodies and gave them proper burials (or what was left of them, lets not forget this is still a number of decades after the Fall)

I don't see any places in Uru which have the plague residue covering their surface. This is clearly described in both BoD and Book of Ti'ana. Does this mean that all of the places we can get to have been visited before us?

Well yes, by the DRC, and the D'ni survivors before that.

There's a reason they told us not to drink the lake water.

Actually, I think I might be on to something--manual labor and heavy lifting must have been a necessity in D'ni culture, despite their advantage in being able to link instead of relying mostly on vehicular shipping/transportation. If you can only link with what you can carry, exceptionally strong workers would be a necessity. This, in turn, would help to determine social position based on one's physiology...though I'm sure that there are high-gravity ages where people could be groomed for service.

Gloves and other clothing don't seem to interfere with linking in any way, but what is the limit to this? What if someone with a prosthetic limb were to attempt to link using their prosthetic hand, would the book still recognize that they are trying to link?