I would like to remind everyone that the game is in constant update.
When the scavenging code was created, about 90% of weapons were useless and about 99.9% or armor were useless... Compared to what they are now. The changes in prices were made to reflect what now consists of about 3 years of hard work by the admin and a bunch of players that helped describe the items we have.
To put things in perspective, Xo5 is one of the high end armor in the game, one of the items I like to call "Golden Carrots", did provide less protection than what a Protek layer does today. A machette was very bad, most melee weapons were useless and knives only had one, maybe two that were worth it.
We've been improving these items and systems iteratively in the past years. Every so often something new is available, adjusted, fixed, made proper, made fair. It takes a lot of work doing the maths behind it, describing it, creating new items, balancing everything across the board, planning, presenting, discussing, reworking, brainstorming, testing and then putting it out for the players to use.
But the moo is so big and has so many subroutines that we don't see every ramification of every change. The issue with the 110% price on NPCs buying things was a flag that was raised a long time ago but left aside as weekly caps would control it to a point. Now the development team has come to a point where they could allocate resources to fix that flag, that issue, that worry or bug. And once looked upon and prodded, it started to stink real bad. So we fixed the issue, notified the playerbase and set IC reactions to player's IC actions accordingly.
There are loads of ways for people to make money. But the "Golden Carrots" should be items players should be working hard to get, not exploiting the game for it. Xo3 and Xo5 should be badge of worth in the Mix... You either lived enough to buy a set or killed someone for theirs...
Yes corpies should have easy access to these items, it is themely, as it is themely for mixers to kill corpies for anything shiny they carry. Mixers should be stealing, scheming, blackmailing, mugging, conning, or doing whatever they can think of to get these high-end items.
Yes scavenging got a bit of a cut, it happens when you're refactoring parts of the game to make sense. Yes people will get annoyed at that, because the easy money scheme is now gone. We're sorry, but you should be looking at better ways to get things that aren't abusing the code of the game.
Codewise the NPCs not paying as much as they are, will counterballance correctly with the markets, haggling and non automated forms of trading.
So things are not set in stone. The game is in constant improvement, expect things to change, chin up and game on.