SummaryCurrent situationAll items have a fixed deterioration rate. Without repair, therefore, all shovels finished on hour X would crumble completely on hour Y. Repair is variable based on skill.
Proposed situationAll items will have a variable item "quality". Therefore, while all shovels will deteriorate at the same rate, some will start from a higher point and therefore take longer to crumble. This "quality" is dependent on the skill of the person making the item.
ProsAdds relevance & value to the skill of the person making the item.
Adds variety to tools and weapons beyond item type, as no two weapons/tools would be the same (limited by the variation scale against the number of said tool in game
).
ConsAdded server load and extra information to hold for each item.
I'll amend the above as people comment below.
Those with a short attention span, can stop reading here. 
Further detailCurrently the life of an object is dictated by the rot rate set by the Resources Department. All objects of a type rot at this same rate.
The proposal will follow these steps:
1) Each item type will have a minimum item quality (based on the resources, e.g. iron/steel/wood/bone etc.). For this example, lets say 500.
2) Each item will have a fixed build time, the same as now. e.g. 8 hours.
3) For each tick that a person is working on a project, an amount will be added to the item quality. This will be based on the skill of the worker, e.g. an expert might add 50, an awkward 20. So after 4 hours of an expert/awkward working, the item will be complete. The workers have finished the item and added 280 of the item quality.
Alternative: only the highest skill level of the participating characters is used at each tick (as suggested by Piscator). 4) Upon completion, the quality is fixed and cannot be altered. For this item, the quality is 780, whereas if the expert had done it alone it would have 900. The "quality" is visible within bands, e.g. the 780 item is good standard, the 900 is excellent. This visibility will be based on a scale for each asset (i.e. an excellent crowbar will last longer than an excellent bone knife).
5) The item will continue to rot at the same rate e.g. if the rot for the item is 1 per day, a good item will last 780 days, the excellent item 900 days.
Notes- for items with multiple semi-finished objects, the final values will be added together (and increased slightly by the worker who finishes the item). e.g. a claymore made by the expert above may have a 700 blade, a 300 hilt and take 2 hours to complete, giving a final quality of 1100.
- it may be possible further down the line to vary the quality a person adds by the tools they use; e.g. an expert with a stone hammer does his skill x 0.8, whereas an expert with a steel hammer does his skill x 1
- ideally, this would coincide with the scrapping of the variation on completion time according to skill. e.g. an awkward person makes an item in 1 day but it has lower quality compared to the item made by an expert in 1 day.
- The tools effectiveness could also be affected by the items quality, e.g. an excellent claymore does 1 damage, a good claymore 0.8 damage, a poor claymore 0.5 damage etc.
Thoughts & feedback?
