i still ike to have a Blacksmith who could upgrade gear in their loom levels.
The most anoying part for me always was to sort out the different loom levels, what should be used for "prestige fights" and what for "patrolling", that even such a catagory emerged in my mind(and i guess not only there) speaks volums.
I like to be able to sepparate my faction, by the quality of gear we could produce from others, we had early on Steel Picks +3 and Mercs and Coa bought them from us or we just brought a few around to have them in their fights =), anyhow i like the concept of -/+ loom levels, i just dont like that we have then a crazy amount of small piles of that crap which we need to hord till we get a usable number together to outfit something with it or that later on when there was enough money , that stuff was just sold.
Instead give me a blacksmith, where i need to pay a % of the weapon also depending on the loom level it is increased to and therefor we get rid of these chunks of small piles of garbage laying around for ages to rott on our characters.
To individualize it, you could say only where that certain type of gear had been loomed to a certain level, the blacksmith also could upgrade it to that level. Therefor, we would need to ship around - loomlvl gear, but in the end would create nice gear again, with only a few stacks and easier to handle.
EDIT:
if you would want to make it real easy though, 100% resale price form original price and no loom levels. That but takes away a bit of the individuality and possibilities for gear deals.