I think that a safe "repair" window would help and it wouldn't hurt the interaction between players that already exists. Yes, reputation is very important but there might be those who won't care about it. I remember an incident in Dwarvesbane where a member lent his daggers to a fellow DB only to have them stolen. The character, being in the same guild, was supposed to be trustworthy but then logged off and deleted himself (which, IMHO is totally OOC lame: the IC way to do it should have been to just run off and face the consequences of his theft). If this sort of thing can happen in a guild (yes, you can say that it was the players fault and no "cheat" was resorted to, that's been discussed, and it's not the point here), I can only see it coming eventually in the case of repair. What if a player is mad at another one OOC and creates an alt to be a repairman. He could then steal and delete the items of the player he wants to get or just do this to steal from other players.
On the other hand, many of our characters are RPed as warriors. I personally think that part of being a warrior is to be able to take care of their weapons, as well as to take care of wounds. I trained my character to do just so, not to be an expert in repair, but to have suffcient knowledge in the matter to repair her own blades. Being a ranger, she might not be near anyone with the skill to help for a while when she's out of town. That seems right for my character.
Finally, I don't quite understand why those who like axes have it so difficult: strong axes are the toughest to loot, they are the most complicated and the slowest to repair and they also happen to be quite slow in battle... I'm ok with the last feature (I've been sent to the DR bench by axe swings many times, so it's a matter of skill), but the first two might need to be addressed. After all, we don't want all characters to use the same kind of weapons, that's an OOC strategy to gain an edge in combat. I don't want to go off-topic here but why are they so hard to repair? Do all weapons wear out at the same speed?