Its going to be hard to fix all the design mistakes made in this game in one fell swoop.
- The issues are - too many mods for items with nearly half undesirable (lower req, reflect dmg etc etc).
- Things wear out too slowly and essentially never break (my sampire has been wearing and reparing the same armor for 5 years or more).
- Replacing items with exact versions is only possible with imbuing.
- Property inflation (remember when a 25 DI weapon was standard and 40% was godly? now you can make 50% if you want).
If you really wanted to fix the game to make it more fun to hunt and find loot:
1 - Wipe everything
2 - Shorten the list of mods available on items
3 - Make things wear out or break must faster (IE you can repair an item 20 times and then it breaks)
4 - Spawn loot that is more consistent so you can replace the same loot via hunting
5 - Allow imbuing to replace properties (replace Luck with HCI or whatever)
This would make it such that you could craft a suit and reasonably replace a piece that broke by finding another like piece and replacing a mod with imbuing for example.
Imagine that loot dropped with something like this:
Mage Arms
Basic 10/10/10/10/10 Mana 2 LMC 4 LRC 10 Int 2
Strong 12/12/12/12/12 Mana 4 LMC 6 LRC 15 Int 3
Advanced 15/15/15/15/15 Mana 6 LMC 8 LRC 20 Int 4
Legendary 20/20/20/20 Mana 8 LMC 10 LRC 25 Int 5
Then you could always replace with something similar. Obviously you can change the resist spread or whatever but again - if my Advanced arms that I found and replaced LRC with Stamina via imbuing were to break - I would find or buy another one from loot and replace and go back to adventuring.
Simplify this crap and then spend all your development time on events, new things to explore, etc. STOP messing with loot, bods, crafting and other systems. Lets get back to an adventure game.
Look at damn Fortnite. Kids PLAY the game. They adventure over and over again - they lose all their stuff at the end of a game and don't care because everyone started with nothing every game. ITS FUN because you aren't sitting around in front of a spreadsheet trying to figgure out if this new gorget will fit into your suit.
I guarantte you UO isn't making $2.3B a year. It could be tho if you but the right minds on it.