Lemme start by saying that though this game tries to go for darker tones, it still feels very high fantasy to me. That is important. Themes matter when implementing things like player wealth, durability, etc.
In my view, throwing out carrots the player can never get and making players feel like paupers in a high fantasy game after they have raided countless vaults, stolen from dozens of mansions and trekked for hours through loot filled dungeons makes no sense. By the end game, I should be sitting pretty in my tricked out fantasy pimp mansion. I should be able to buy whatever I want and feel like my efforts have seriously PAID off.
If the setting were a post apoc one (FO, Underrail, etc) or some kinda super gritty/quasi realistic medieval fantasy setting, then I would right there with you. But that sorta thing doesnt fit the themes of this game world.
I think you misunderstand me. There always appear more "urgent" needs for money IRL - like curing diseases worldwide or colonizing Mars. I am trying to avoid the typical situation in CRPGs where money is not an issue. If you can afford everything, that makes the game uninteresting and the feature of money redundant. Money should be scarce enough and goods for sale powerful enough that you feel you have really accomplished something when you buy something from a merchant - and that you are forced to choose NOT to buy other goods, which you will buy at a later playthrough. As you get richer, the exclusive goods you are able to buy gets more and more interesting. It does not make the player feel like a pauper if they can not afford legendary weapons from the king's armoury. What would make the player feel like a pauper is if they could not afford bread or something in the late game. If the player comes upon a situation when money does not matter you have failed fundamentally with a game mechanic.
Durability is a game mechanic which would prevent players from farming gold too easily, by making farming useless through the losses incurred by weapon degradation. Tuning your repair skill is then key to asymptotically gaining a fortune through the entire game.
You've just demonstrated why this isn't a good idea - you give Fallout and Age of Decadence as examples, which are single-character affairs. In a party-based game, you're always able to have every skill, and there's no meaningful choice to be made. - unless taking the same skill multiple times has a cumulative effect, which is something that PoE does to an extent.
Wrong. The problem is just that multi-character games are often not balanced to take this into account.
Assume you were some kind of more realistic adventuring party. Let us observe the "repair/weaponsmith" skill. Would you need every character to be a bicycle repair man? No. A real-life adventuring party would likely have one squire, smith or handyman who is specialized in weapons and armour maintenance. Hell, if we are to be realistic the fighter in full armour might not even be able to don it himself without aid.
So what about the advantage of having several characters with the same skill? Well, you're right in that of course. A party would only need one smith. Maybe if we are to be obscenely realistic, other characters with "repair/weaponsmith" skill would be able to confer a tiny bonus to the party's designated smith. This would reflect them looking over his shoulder and correcting mistakes using a lower level of knowledge. In reality, knowledge is not additive but comes with great redundancy as we all know, but it never hurts with too detailed game mechanics. Letting one character handle a certain skill is actually realistic and desired behaviour.
Now here comes the interesting part. Most RPGs we have seen have actually failed in the area of party skills. Take NWN2 for example. I don't know which parties you used, but I felt I could pretty much do everything I wanted in terms of skills all the way through to the end of the game. You are right that this offered little meaningful choice. This reflects a failure on the part of the game designers to have tough enough skill requirements, or there might be too few skills. Not that there was a lot Obsidian could to in that regard considering they used D&D. But think about balancing things something like this instead:
Magic user-type skills: Alchemy, Scholarly Lore, Magic
Rogue-type skills: Mechanics, Sneak, Sleight of Hand
Fighter-type skills: Repair/Weaponsmith, weapon proficiencies
General skills: Intimidation, Diplomacy, Physiology, Wilderness Lore, Streetwise/Sense Motive
These are about 15 skills. Suppose you have a party of 4. Now if you max Intelligence or whatever the stats are in this system which helps you gain skill points with every character, you should in my opinion only be able to solve the very toughest skill checks the game offers in those four skills. And then you will suck ass at exactly everything else. Skill checks should be spread out so that most are fairly easy with a few being harder. Successes at hard skill checks are greatly rewarded, but fails at easy skill checks are severely punished - this will encourage both generalist and specialist playstyles.
How fucking hard can it be to not shower the player with skill points? It's not that hard in theory. It's just that few developers of party-based RPGs seem to care about choices and consequences in character creation.
