Regarding your second suggestion, i have been thinking of some way to give a use to useless items that just sit in peoples inventory/bank. What if there was an option to deconstruct items, for some sort of currency, that then can be used to either use in shops, or potentially add upgrades to items?
For example lets say when you dismantle an item, you get X amount of "parts". The more stats the item has the more parts you get maybe. Then once you get enough parts, you could add them to an item/mine to give it a random style? Maybe randomly change the paint color (on non rare paint colors). Idk
Thoughts?