I think Item Upgrades could be reworked a bit. Currently, you would have to be crazy to try and upgrade the exceptional or elite items that drop. It just doesnt make sense with how rare they are to risk losing the item. However, it can be some time between useful drops and during that time all you are getting is quest rewards and talent points (which are both awesome!). Additionally, at higher levels money loses its value. There's nothing to spend it on and you end up just changing loot filters and all that loot goes to waste. So for item upgrades I propose the following which in my head seems easy to implement but i'm just a filthy armchair developer.

Items no longer have a chance to break, chance to fail upgrade is the same, but upgrades are more expensive. The tiers are not changed by rarity color (white, blue, yellow) just quality color (normal/exceptional/elite)
Normal Quality items: 500gold per upgrade (500 for 1 5000 for 10)
Exceptional Quality items: 1000 gold per upgrade (1000 per 1, 10000 for 10)
Elite Quality items: 2000 gold per upgrade (2000 gold per 1, 20000 for 10)

This gives people another avenue of feasible character development and gives some usefulness to money. What do you think? )))))

there's a good strategy for upgrading items -- wait until you have duplicates. upgrade the duplicates side by side until one breaks. keep repeating this every time you find a duplicate and eventually you'll get the item to level 10.

Maybe! The "making gold useful" aspect of the game has been largely neglected for a while now. I plan to address it at some point.

Would love to have gold be useful. I stopped selling anything a long time ago.