I think I know the answer to this but want to confirm before either abandoning the game or digging into a really complicated attempt to fix:

Is there any way to add the scholar tag to a player character in a 4-person multiplayer game that is already well underway?

Our party is on Reaper's Coast and we're hitting major roadblocks in our campaign by not having this tag. All of the companions have departed, so recruiting one of them is not an option. We tried getting rid of one of the player-characters to substitute with a mercenary but we were unsuccessful in getting rid of the player character (tried all kinds of stuff, including going to war, killing him, etc., to no avail). Even if we did get that to work, there'd be severe limitations for someone in our party.

We did find instructions for hacking a save-file that might be possible, but boy is it complicated and messy.

We are considering abandoning the game and switching to ESO if we can't get this fixed.

Any tips?