Isn't cost of repair relative? Why should looks have to suffer because repair is beyond the reach of some percent of the population but not others? If you had

Isn't cost of repair relative? Why should looks have to suffer because repair is beyond the reach of some percent of the population but not others? If you had better tools/skills to repair more items wouldn't that lower the cost of the repair? In your example, could the plastic lens be repaired by a toolkit that can sand it down and refinish the plastic thereby avoiding complete replacement? New cars have LED tail lights. Once failure occurs, the common procedure to repair is to replace the entire module. However if you had skills to do a low level debug of the board, you could isolate the failed component (passives like resistors/capacitors/led modules or ICs) and just replace that one component repeairing the module for a much cheaper price. I've been thinking about this recently. I do vintage PC restoration as an on and off hobby and recently I had a PC case with a front cover made of transparent acrylic with scratches. It also has text painted on the plastic. After failing to restore the piece using various polishes, I've considered either taping off the painted text and using a sanding + a buffing machine or just sanding/buffing it down completely and setting up a screen printing system to recreate the logos/text. Its a 20$ Pentium 4 Shuttle PC so its not worth the time and effort but the skills gained would unlock the ability to do better repairs on more expensive machines. With enough skillset it appears that you can have your looks and your repairability at the same time.