Some CC lots have no name or description when opened in game, they're just "Lot Name" plus a thumbnail. I see one way to fix this, but I'm looking for another one that's quicker and easier.

The one fix I can think of:
1. Place the lot into an empty lot in-game.
2. Figure out what the lot is. Perhaps you'll need to go through your library folder and google every item so you can pull up what it looks like from the site you downloaded it from. This might be easier if they're installed sims3pack files rather then package files, since perhaps you can use the launcher to see what they look like?
3. Rename the lot, fill in the description. You can get this info from either the website you downloaded it from or from opening the package file with S3PE and reading the _xml section.
4. Save a copy of the lot. Rename file in library if desired.
5. Delete the old unnamed lot.

This is pretty convoluted, so it brings up an obvious question: What if I could open the package file and fix the problem itself?

I *think* this info is stored in the LDES section of the package file when opened with s3pe. Unfortunately, that section is in hexadecimal format, which I can open up with a hex editor but then I have no idea what to do once I'm in there.

Anyone have any insight into this? Anything more obvious I'm missing? It must be an extremely common problem because seemingly like a quarter of all custom lots have this issue.

Can't you just rename the lots in edit town? Apologies if I'm missing something.

I'm a little confused like @darren111 is about your request, in that you're making this seem more complicated than it needs to be. Like he said, just rename the lots in edit town. If you want to reuse the lot with the edited information for a different game, then just export and you'll have a new version of that file with all the new information intact.

I guess that they got their answer.

To be fair, OP did outright list editing the lot ingame as their first idea. They seem plenty aware of that option.
It just sounds like they wanted the additional control of actually fixing these lots directly, or to make the edit in a simpler way.

LDES editing was never implemented. I found the thread where they probably saw where using a hex editor is suggested and I'll clear that up now that that is not how this works. I believe the main value of even being able to look at the hex of data in S3PE is just to spot corruption or modified data where it can't be seen in the interface. Editing the data at a hex level would be quite literally trying to make a change in the raw binary, which is a little extreme for our purposes

Given that the majority of the resources that make up a lot are not editable, I think the possibility of fixing it at a package level is slim, unfortunately.

The 2. step could probably be minimised by starting fresh, converting any sims3pack lots to package, renaming any non-descriptive files, then adding them in small batches. You could then open the packages and look at their ICON file and find the matching one in your lot bin. Place, rename, export. Tedious yes, but a far shot less so than learning to code in hex