I am also interested in using InnoDB for course tables. I am willing to offer assistance as well, but my experience with Perl and Github are minimal. If nothing more, I'd like to at least make it known that there are other users that are interested in this. I didn't want to start a discussion at GitHub yet because I'm not sure I'm the best representative to start the discussion, especially after seeing the plethora of resources that you have recently combed through that can justify the reasonings better than I can.
When InnoDB became the default MySQL engine about 10 years ago I soon saw that OPL_update was taking 50-100 times longer than before (on my hardware) so I switched the default engine to MyISAM in my install instructions. Since then people have specified MyISAM for virtually all WeBWorK database tables (actually I believe all except the OPL_global_statistics table). This is now done in two places in the config files, one for course database tables and the other for the OPL tables.
Recently I tried running OPL_update on a virtual server with the latest version of MySQL (8.0.23), Ubuntu 20.04, WeBWorK 2.15, etc. using both MyISAM and InnoDB. Using the MyISAM engine, it took 3 hr and 7 min. Using the InnoDB engine, it took 1 hr and 3 min. Not surprisingly, things have changed a lot in ten years.
I think we should give serious thought to making InnoDB the default engine.
Arnie
Recently I tried running OPL_update on a virtual server with the latest version of MySQL (8.0.23), Ubuntu 20.04, WeBWorK 2.15, etc. using both MyISAM and InnoDB. Using the MyISAM engine, it took 3 hr and 7 min. Using the InnoDB engine, it took 1 hr and 3 min. Not surprisingly, things have changed a lot in ten years.
I think we should give serious thought to making InnoDB the default engine.
Arnie