open-ended

I'm very much hoping this isn't a feature request for 4.8... I'll just explain my situation:

I'm making a fundraising auction site for a nonprofit arts center, and really all I want to do is add some attributes for the volunteers adding items to fill out in addition to the description, that is, have a field to enter the name of the person who donated the item, and another field for the estimated market value.

I thought it would be trivial to create my own product type based on the auction module and with an extra field or two, but it has not been!

I can see many reasons to add open-ended text fields in addition to one big block for "description" to products, so I hope someone has some experience or advice.