Having repair being difficult as it is now will make it a skill worth having. With only a limited amount of people with the dedication to get the ability it'll give players a reason to go to blacksmiths to get their items repaired. Plus, there's not a lot of inherent difficulty in mcmmo, so having something difficult gives people something to achieve.

Also, perhaps give an extra incentive to the repair, like 100% chance to keep enchantments after a very high level.

I agree with both sides here.  i do feel that the stone teir is indeed very tedious and needs a small adjustment to the speed at which you can advance to at least gold.  I feel that gold and Iron should take a substantial amount of time and effort before you reach diamond, to give what Reigando suggested earlier.  Instead of taking 3 days to get into the gold teir (level 30) we should try and advance past that since most players will migrate from using stone tools and weapons into at least gold and iron after about 15 - 30 mins of mining.  With iron and gold, the amount of tedium is reduced, even if the same amount of xp or even more xp is required per level since a player will be able to use both tools and armor in the leveling process. 

Please post comments and suggestions as to what you feel below.  Remember to be respectful and polite, and give as much reason and solid evidence as to why you feel one way or the other.

I have no problem with repair being difficult to level, as it should be.  The reward for having a high level repair skill is enough to justify the time and resources involved, even if to simply save material versus crafting a replacement.  If you absolutely want to keep your enchants, you're better off using a vanilla anvil, but if you simply want the convenience of saving resources and time by repairing regular tools, MCMMO repair is immediately useful from level 0. 

Iron is plenty abundant, so if you absolutely must use iron tools and armor for everything and can't bother to level repair to 70, I'm sure there will be people willing to do a free repair in exchange for the XP.  To me this seems pretty inconvenient considering the difference in durability relative to the difference in abundance of material.  Pretty sure I'm at or near repair level 10 after a casual weekend of playing, which is pretty good pace in my estimation.  I wouldn't expect to be repairing diamond before the server is out of beta, and that's fine as starting from nothing with intentions of using diamonds for everything is impractical. 

For what it's worth, my mining level is over 100, and I've only gone through 1-2 iron picks, and ~10% of the durability of a diamond pick for obsidian.  The rest has all been done with stone picks which I've probably repaired a good 250-300 times now.  The same amount of mining would have probably consumed somewhere around 6-8 stacks of iron ingots or 1-1/2 stacks of diamonds (guesstimating those numbers), and while I'l gladly upgrade when resources permit, using and repairing stone tools is obviously not a detriment to getting a good start.  For reference, that amount of mining yielded somewhere around ten double chests of stone, but only perhaps 4 or 5 stacks of iron, and 9 diamonds, which may give perspective to what the obvious choice of tool is going to be.

Someone had indicated that they were initially only able to repair wooden tools, and if this is true I suspect it was a bug as I was able to repair stone tools from the very beginning, and saw nothing in /repair or any MCMMO help screens to state that a minimum level was required for stone repair, as gold, iron, and diamond clearly state what their minimum level requirements are set to. 

I may have seen a slith difference, going from ~22 to 30 in a few hours but I'm not 100% sure.

Anyway, the problem as stated before isn't really the slow leveling but the Iron Repair level.

70 seems really too high for bread and butter repairs. Iron is common, indeed, but you can't repair it for a long time.