Does FFXIV really need repair? Fix?

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And, I don't have to worry about giving another player my gear to fix.

Which you can't do with "used" / (even partialy) spiritbonded gear anyway. The proper way would be to have Repair Requests (the same way as the Meld Requests works now).

Personally - the biggest grip I have with (self) repair system is the "need" of having 5 tiers of dark matter which indeed (if you want to be really economic as of course otherwise you can use simply tier 5 matter for all repairs) means additional 4 losts taken from your inventory. That's purely insane - they should remove all the tiers, have just ONE dark matter and use it as a "currency" for repairs (even simplier would be simply to deduct cost of dark matter from you gil ballance every time you perform a repair) and set the "cost" of each tier of gear accordingly - like tier 1 will cost 1 of the "new" dark matter, tier 2 will cost 2 ... tier 5 will cost 5 "new" dark matters ... Alternativelly - move the dark matter (and if possible also the melding Carbonized matter) to the shards / crystal / cluster inventory tab so they'll not take additional valuable main inventory space. That would save up to 10 slots in the inventory.

And - indeed it would be nice not to be foreced to swap arround crafting classes to do the repairs but once you get into habit doing your own repairs it's not that much of hassle anymore and it's considerable saving too.