Looks to me like most people get the original argument. We're talking about the entertainment value of durability here - is it a strategic challenge that provides any kind of challenge? The answer is a unanimous 'no'. Carrying around repair hammers = yawn. What we're saying is - if it's to stay, how can we make it actually interesting?
Anyway, I think I've said all I can on the topic, using the ideas of others above who've given this a bit of thought. In a nutshell, I can't see any reason for it to stay outside of combat - repair hammers and/or looking for a repair shopkeeper is drudge. It's like the kind of task you might get on a Monday morning in work. The kind of thing that makes you close the game and do something else with your precious free hours.
Easiest solution is to drop it. No one complains, no one feels the loss, the game is all the better without it. Hardest solution is to keep it and invest enough thinking into it to turn it into something that's actually enjoyable and contributes to the strategy. I vote for the former (simply because it requires less intellectual effort, and the game has more interesting mechanics already that only stand to benefit from extra time/resources/thinking).
The only kind of RPGs (or RPG-likes) that I played where durability added something to the experience were games with time or space in the backpack intended as limited resources (Ultima Underworld, Betrayal at Krondor, Jagged Alliance, etc..).
In a game stripped of any other survival element like D:OS, durability simply doesn't work. Same goes with item identification.
I'll gladly drop both...
