Just an idea for breakage, if it came back. You take your item to the local museum for repair. The museum(s) would be revamped to have display cases and more staff. While your items is being fixed, you get to take an item from the display case. This would depend on value, mundane items would get a relatively mundane substitute. Special items would get special items for replacement. Proactive repair is effectively loaning your weapon to the museum for a day or so. Actually broken items take longer, perhaps a week.

The scale of cost would be sliding, if you take a museum item as a substitute, you are charged more. If you want it faster than 24 for maintenance, or a week for full repair, you pay more. If you decide to keep your substitute or lose it, you pay for it. Subsequent repairs are cheaper, because they know your item. You could "join" the museum for a future discount, in exchange for a monthly payment. Such an agreement would entitle the patron to borrow items on a monthly basis. Strange items or odd materials could be sold to the museum as a slightly different version of the pawnshop. Perhaps you get a finders fee for finding an exact match for something on display from the treasure system or it becomes a bounty task. Maybe once a year, the museum does a raffle or auction to get rid of loaner weapons and armor.

There are a couple of bonuses for this system. People who create weapons now have a place to showcase them outside of the treasure system as loan items. Additionally, the system would "create a display copy" of your prized weapon, other players can see it in a case while being worked on. Maybe one or more of the local shop keepers starts making knockoffs of the items brought in for repair. Not exact copies, but they would have something of the flavor. Say a sword engraved with wings sparks a fad of engraved armor or embroidered robes. If possible, the bounty system could be slightly modified to occasionally mention the museum as losing an item instead of a citizen.

Magarven the Mad