"Repair hammers that wear out," was used in TES: Morrowind and Oblivion and was generally regarded as awful. People were hauling a hardware store's worth of hammers around to be able to put their gear back together after every fight, and has already been pointed out, it's not even doing anything meaningful or interesting, just adding more tedious micromanagement.
I'm not really concerned about how it worked in other games or how it was regarded by the community there, as it's very much like comparing apples to oranges when going from one game to the next.
The point of the "repair hammers that wear out" was simply to: 1) move permanent durability damage
away from player equipment and onto a consumable tool that can be easily purchased, and 2) to create a gold sink that is still preferable to not having the repair skill at all *while also costing the player less as they invest more points into their repair skill*.
I'm not sure if that can be considered more or less "tedious micromanagement" than we have with the current system in-game, but the suggestion does remove permanent durability loss from our beloved gear while keeping the importance of the repair skill and the spirit of repairing intact.. and that was the goal.
If I was just looking to make it as beneficial and painless to the player as possible, I would have just suggested removing durability from the game entirely. And death. And character development restrictions. And..
However, if you feel the developers will be excited about the suggestion to remove durability loss then, by all means, run with it. I would rather not have durability loss myself, but I'm assuming they spent time on this system because the idea of repair was important to them. And so my suggestion is trying to work within that unfortunate conundrum. It's the
"what kind of request can we get away with" approach.
