I don't know, the NPC wanted 10k to repair lvl 48 belt and 5k for a lvl 38 weapon. Based on that, I'm assuming most gear mid 30's thru 50 was 5-10k+ per piece--times however many slots there are (10-15ish?).
NPC repairs are kind of steep 1000 gil per level grade (so a lvl 41-50 item will cost 5k to repair) but it encourages you to either level a craft and repair it yourself or find an LS member or random person to repair it for you, they have added a 1 click repair system that will put all equipped items up for player repair now also.
Seemed like a pretty significant expenditure. If it degrades slow enough for that kind of cost to be a non-issue, then it sounds like it's probably slow enough to just drop the system entirely.
Firstly gil is extremely easy to come by in this game its nothing like FFXI, and there has to be some form of death penalty, the game is already too easy, even WoW has durbaility lose on death.
Ultimately it's a question of does anyone really enjoy tracking down repair materials and constantly bugging friends/LS's to repair their gear--or worst yet, spamming shouts in towns?
You no longer need specific repair materials, all repairs require the same item Grade 1-5 dark matter and they are extremely easy to come by.
For the vast majority of players, that answer is probably no. There are a hundred better ways to remove gil from the economy, and if they want people to craft, they should have created a crafting system that was fun and rewarding--not one they have to force players to do.
The latest changes to the crafting system have made it much more fun, not everything should be handed to the player, there needs to be some challenge.
Not really sure what's going on with the Inn. The icon on the map leads to an NPC standing beside a door. He speaks gibberish in some made up accent, no idea what he says.
Guess you started in Limsa if you didn't like Jibberish maybe you should have started in Gridania or Ul'dah
(that being said you can get an INN room at any city)
It doesn't seem to be a lead of any sort, just standard throw away dialogue. I'm assuming there is a different NPC at some undisclosed location with a quest and/or some rambling dialogue that grants access to the inn at the first NPC. This really speaks to the larger issue of why they have lock everything behind an NPC, quest, or meaningless back story. Take for example having to locate and talk to NPC's to activate your achievement list. Seriously, WTF.
The INN quest has one of the funniest cutscene/characters in the game, obviously if you don't spam enter and read what is said its kind of amusing and plenty of people enjoyed the quest line and asked for more on the official forums.
The map is a problem because it's position grid is dual numeric. This is great for people familiar with long/lat--not so much for your average joe who is simply going to guess at which is which and wind up at the wrong location half the time.
The reason for this is because most area's maps are too big and the grid too large to be 26 squares 9 (A-Z), they said even in 2.0 with smaller zones and redesigned area's the maps will still be too big to add alpha-numericals to the map.
Maybe they've added somethings since (I didn't spend a great amount of time with the map), but it used to be lacking any type of zoom function or user created waypoints as well. It also scrolls horribly slow with the controller, not sure about m/kb.
We will be getting all of that in 2.0, there is only so much the dev team can do, the team is basically split between two projects at the moment and 2.0 is taking priority.