Today, I have made numerous attempts to sell a set of Godarmor to the masses of the server. On 1.8, the set of armor would go flying off the shelf like a hotcake, but that wasn't the case today. I then came to the conclusion that there was a culprit that was in the control of Mojang: the Mending enchantment. Before in 1.8, armor and tools had limited use depending on the anvil's max repair level of 39. It wouldn't let you repair after 39 by saying "Too Expensive!" This isn't a problem in 1.9 however because a mob grinder or just mining ores gives enough XP to repair armor and tools with Mending. In other words, Mending has broken the barter economy of vanilla servers due to there being an unlimited supply of XP to repair with. I'm not sure what this means for the Mending enchantment, but the SMP economy (at least on vanilla servers) won't be the same.
If anyone has thoughts on this, I'd love to hear em.
-Spy