Your suspicions are unfounded. I’m still using the kits, but wishing they didn’t degrade the maximum durability, the way it was before the update, when they were called “legendary”.
My complaints about the grind stem partly from my memories of what playing was like before I switched to legendary kits, and partly from the grind of replacing unrepairable legendaries.
I dislike adding grind for grind’s sake, especially when there’s already plenty of unnecessary grind and the game doesn’t need more.
Grindstone and lower-tier kits are worthless, except in early game when you don’t have access to better ones, and I’m not defending them.
As for grandmaster kits, I’m defending those only because you don’t realize that your suggestion is based on the flawed premise that repair button is always better than using kits, instead of being a tradeoff that can sometimes work better and sometimes worse than alternatives. In other words, your suggestion incorrectly treats the repair button as a strictly dominant choice, and proposes to remove an interesting choice.
Both you and Taemien are insisting on kits being a strictly dominated choice because you won’t use them. I am perfectly happy to use them to extend the life of my items before I have to re-craft them and reduce total costs.
I hope I clarified my position, but I’ll go a bit further and try to give you wider context.
As I said above, I believe this game has way too much grind as it is, chiefly due to overuse of RNG. Too many features of this game have been implemented using slot-machine mechanics. Trade a fragment of power in the Esoteric Library? Random scroll. Open a chest with a skeleton key? Random legendary item. Look for a thrall? Random, random, random.
This all adds to the grind, and what it adds up to is frustrating tedium.
And now they decided to make it much, much worse, by buffing legendaries to an extreme while making them unrepairable. On top of that, they made the repair kits reduce maximum durability every time they’re used.
In the middle of that grindfest comes your suggestion to add some more grind.
I’ve written at length elsewhere about the imbalance between the intrinsic and extrinsic incentives for engaging with the content. I’m not going to repeat it here, but you’re welcome to read it if you want to. Suffice it to say that I disagree with the devs’ efforts to force us to “repeat content”, in their own words. They’re resorting to their favorite game design doctrine: “balancing” the game with a sledgehammer.
We really don’t need a change that would make things even worse, especially if it’s based on a flawed premise about the efficacy of kits.