I haven't really noticed my gear breaking faster, but then I always repair my gear whenever I'm near a capable NPC anyway regardless of how much durability I might be missing. I didn't even notice the increased teleport cost since they're pretty trivial anyway.

I don't think new players have to worry. The rate of gear decay, cost of repairs, and teleport costs (when you factor in three favorites and a free destination) are lower than when the rest of us started at launch and us non-legacy players did just fine. There are also many more ways for fledgling adventurers to earn gil compared to what we had at launch.

At least it's not like 1.0 where your teleports were severely limited and you were forced to rely on other players to repair your gear since npcs couldn't repair gear to 100% and there was some gear they couldn't repair at all (at least while I was playing).