A Reasonable Rebalance of Mending - Making Anvils Relevant Again

Rather than converting experience directly into durability on the fly, I believe the mending enchantment would make more sense if it instead makes an enchanted item either immune to "prior work penalty" or immune to "Too Expensive".

This way, a mending enchanted item CAN be repaired indefinitely... but you must consciously invest experience into it *and* consume materials in order to do so, and furthermore must continue to use an anvil to do so.

Anvils exist for mending tools. The mending enchantment should synergize with anvils rather than replace them completely.

I understand that people may feel that this would be annoying, but the current system is just ... too unbalanced right now. Plus, it would be nice if this could be a fair bargain such that mending no longer needs to be mutually exclusive with infinity on bows.

I believe this will functionally be the most elegant solution to the overpowered mending problem.