Improving things feels better than stopping them breaking.
I'm playing DOS EE at the moment and have to repair everything after each fight is pretty dull.
Honestly, in those cases I just tend to prefer it to take longer to degrade fully. I find better immersion in a world simply by having the universal law of nothing being indestructible remain true. This includes crates, it includes barrels and treasure chests, and it includes weapons and, yes, even armor. I don't really have a problem, per se, with the way durability is handled at the moment, but I didn't really have a problem with it before, either.
I tend to think that a good durability system is one that adds meaningful choices. In Morrowind, for instance, one of the potential considerations when choosing your armor and weapon was how durable it was. Glass armor and weapons are incredibly strong and light, but break very very fast, whereas Ebony is insanely heavy, but pretty strong and extremely durable. Which one do you use? Depends on how you build your character, as does how you do combat and how you make sure it's maintained. Going with light armor, you're probably trying to be quick and agile. Well, in combat be quick and agile, or your very protective Glass armor won't last long at all. Going with heavy armor, you've definitely got high strength, otherwise you wouldn't even be able to walk around in the armor. You just need a bit of extra weight in repair hammers, because you're probably going to be wading into melee and your armor will take a beating, as is its purpose. It reinforces choices made elsewhere for characterization. Does this not make sense?
