PCs Repair Vehicle Parts to Full

In one of her post vehicle combat updates and reworking of vehicle parts having unique messages if in use and damage, a former coder expressed she wanted it this way to encourage having to buy new parts for corporate characters.

And that it would then see a cycle down of parts to Mixers and mechanics to be able to buy and make a profit off the parts corporate citizens were selling to avoid the social stigma.

I won't share my thoughts about that implementation at the time or how it's unfolded with where vehicle combat is(n't), but I think that was her original reasoning.

Yes that was Mirage's reasoning as I understood it as well. I think that intent failed for numerous reasons, though significantly among them that the implementation of junkyards and price re-balances were never really normalized so we ended up with outlandish situations where going from a part at 99% condition to 100% condition could represent 1000% or 1500% increase in cost, which was so far beyond the means of any player it required a lot of suspension of disbelief.

The other issue is of course, NPCs can do this, and will at any time, so players were outright inferior options for repairing, regardless of cost or expertise.

So whatever the idea was we're left with this idiosyncratic status quo, and I don't think there's really any reason to be carrying that baggage anymore and everyone's experiences would be better off to be rid of it.