Thank you for the replies.

1. I can see that if enough people are skipping it could take off quite a bit of time to kill the bosses fast. However that either relies on luck that enough people will do that, or you've queued in a big enough group to do that. When I come across someone doing whatever they do to skip cutscenes, I've only come across a max of 2 ppl doing so. Guess I've been unlucky/lucky depending on how you view it

2. I don't think it can be a 'lazy' choice to list items under the npc merchant price - isn't the default MB price set to the amount you'd get by selling to an npc merchant? Thus they would have to intentionally change the price to be lower than that... at which point they are making a loss.

I guess it could be "charity" selling - people willing to take a loss to try and get items at a cheaper price to people.

And I do sell or not sell items on MB depending on what the prices are - for those that are selling under npc merchant buying price, I've been holding on or just merchanting them.
Good suggestion to buy them... hadn't thought of that. Make a small profit on them. lol