If I wanted to add 4 fields to hold additional data on a production season.... is the best practice to create a new table and add a form to the custom tab or creating a new field in tkw to house that data?
My concern is using the content tab for something that it is not intended to do which will eventually come back and bite us.
What are your opinions?
It depends what you want to do, really. Gawain's warning about modifying Tessitura tables without good reason is a good one (e.g. TR_SLI_STATUS should be LEFT ALONE), but in particular, I believe that the Content Tab is specifically designed for adding custom elements. I think the table help for TR_INV_CONTENT even suggests that it can be used to manage custom data. If you prefer to use keywords, those also can be customized pretty freely. In particular, we have any number of custom entries both in TR_INV_CONTENT and TR_TKW that are applied to many of our performances/production seasons and then used in custom reports and web functions. Like anything, obviously you need to document what needs to be done to make what happen on your website/on your reports/etc... but it is highly flexible within those standard tables.
I believe the documentation is pretty good for alerting you as to when a table should be left alone, when it can be completely customized to your needs and when there are certain entries that should be pretty much left alone but additions are customizable.
Of course, you can always go the route of a custom table and tab as well. Then at least you know that there is zero chance that a future version of Tessitura will impact your customizations, but as I mentioned above, I believe these particular tables were meant specifically for such customizable things and so should be relatively safe. Just my thoughts.
John