I would rather SE increase the penalty for having broken gear to encourage players to better maintain their equipment in the first place. I didn't level all of my crafters to 60+ so I could babysit someone who sat next to a repair NPC for 20 minutes while waiting for their dungeon queue, but then complain about broken equipment part way into the instance. It sounds like a nice QoL change on paper, but to me it's just doubling down on people's inattentiveness/laziness.

I'm not even sure how well this would work anyway. If SE does add it the person requesting the meld would need to have dark matter on them (just like melds used to work), but if they can't be bothered to maintain their equipment with a repair NPC I can't imagine them having the wherewithal to maintain a stack of dark matter either. Net gain: exactly dick.