I’m not sure if I understand the question correctly, but if you are looking for the information and reference needed to build your own plane in X-Plane, you should start reading here: http:/docs/aircraft/ Next place to check out would probably be the aircraft designer forums on one of the X-Plane community sites, like X-Plane.org and X-Pilot.com – that’s where all the people are that make planes for X-Plane.

Navdata is very unlikely to be successfully crowdsourced. Designing coded flight instrument procedures requires both a fairly expensive software, and extensive knowledge of both real world procedures and encoding rules – I doubt more than three or four people in the whole X-Plane community even have the required knowledge and background. And there’s thousands of airports to be cared for. That’s why we rely on data providers that use the same source as real world airlines do.
The navdata is indeed time-stamped. It’s called the AIRAC cycle date, which is a four digit number that consists of two digits for the year, and two digits for the 28-day period. It’s in the first line of each navdata file – 1610 is the one that ships with X-Plane.

Have you considered sourcing it from the gateway itself?
I had no idea I had to pay for another product to keep x-plane working!

Which one is the primary source of data? Is the navdata time-stamped so you could choose to which source (gateway bs navdata) is the most up to date? Would be odd if gateway changes were held back if I’ve never updated my navdata.

We cannot deliver navdata that we don’t own the rights to. You’ll have to get those from one of the providers who made deals with the big data suppliers to make the data available to flightsimmers. X-Plane has worked with data from Navigraph (sourced from Jeppesen) and Aerosoft (sourced from LIDO) for a long time!

Are you saying X-Plane updates will deliver the latest gateway airports but not the latest navdata? That doesn’t seem right!

Yes. Naming the runway is NOT automatic, but done by the local aviation authority. Also, frequently there are numbers used that do NOT correspond to the magnetic heading at all. See for example LAX with its four parallel runways. They all have the same magnetic heading, but they are named 6L, 6R, 7L and 7R to resolve the ambiguity of four runways in the same direction, but only having L, C and R as letters to distinguish them. Atlanta, Denver, DFW, and others do similar things. And then there’s Canada where some runways are named for true rather than magnetic direction, because far up north, the magnetic direction is so out of whack.