Since making a new thread for this is pointless, I figure here is as good of a place as any to post my thoughts about the durability bug and why I think it's great that it's getting fixed.
First off, I want to differentiate between difficult and challenging. Challenging is always difficult, but difficult is not always challenging. Take this incredibly awesome proof of my immense level design skills, for example. Making this treasure difficult to get to is easy, simply throw in a horde of wheel skeletons with a line of torch hollows behind them. Making it challenging takes a bit more thought. You could place an archer in the narrow part of the hallway and place one of the dual-greatshield enemies in front of him. This means that you have a number of options to get past. You can (1) try and shoot the archer while dodging the greatshield guy, you can (2) use a shield piercing weapon to get past his shields, or (3) you can try and run past greatshield guy to attack the archer first. This is challenging because you are encouraged to adapt to the situation to get around it, instead of the R1-fest that the wheel skeleton/torch hollow layout would encourage.
The point of all that was that the durability bug makes the game more difficult, but not necessarily more challenging. Here's why:
It discourages exploration
Take this other incredibly well designed level. Say I start at the bonfire and decide to go down the left path. I make it about 75% of the way through before my weapon is very close to breaking so I am forced to turn around and go back to the bonfire. I am much less likely to go back down the left pathway because (1) I've already been through 75% of it and redoing that is boring and (2) I know I'm not going to be able to make it the entire way through, so I'm probably going to run past enemies instead.
It's shit for balancing weapons
Durability seems to be a common way for Fromsoft to balance weapons. Many weapon classes, such as rapiers, katanas, etc. are high damage but have low durability in an attempt to make up for it. This is a terrible way to balance weapons because of two reasons. (1) It limits the amount of weapons people can realistically use to get through the game, limiting weapon variety. (2) Balancing around durability is absolutely pointless when you can use repair powder to completely circumvent it. It'd be like if they made greathammers do incredible damage. This incredible damage is balanced by making them attack slowly, but then they add a consumable that makes it attack really quickly. Repair powder completely negates what's supposed to be the downside of more-fragile weapons. At best, it makes durability an annoyance and at worst, it makes durability completely useless.
It's just not fun.
Durability in itself is just not satisfying. You don't get a rush when repairing weapons and most of the time when the "Your weapon is about to break" messages comes up, my reaction is "Fuck, already?"
Counter-arguments and why I disagree
It makes it so you can't R1 spam to victory.
Are we playing the same game? Because 90% of the time, R1 spam leads to you dying. R1 spam doesn't need to be nerfed because it's already the batshit crazy, hail-mary play of the game. You've tried carefully getting through a room 10 times and can't get past it, fuck it, run in and go crazy, maybe it'll work out. R1 spam is high-risk, high-reward and making it so you can't slash more than one enemy at a time without your sword snapping in half takes away from this play.
It makes it so you have to carefully engage enemies and wait to attack them until you're sure that your swing won't hit anything else
This sounds good in theory, but since SotFS added a shitload more group encounters, this really just makes fights a lot more boring. You either have to (1) pull enemies one by one with a ranged weapon which takes forever and makes levels significantly easier or (2) pull all enemies at once then backpedal around until the RNG aspect of the enemies' AI makes it so all enemies but one are stuck in attack animations, leaving you to freely hit that one enemy without fear of your weapon breaking. Even when it seems like a good time to attack, like when 2 enemies are both stuck in attack animations and you could easily hit both once they finish, you are discouraged from taking advantage of this situation because your durability will plummet.
It encourages you to switch weapons
There are much better ways of doing this. If you want to encourage people to use different weapons, do it by giving enemies much more varied resistances to weapon types. For example, in Stonefang Tunnel in Demon's Souls, the enemies there have incredibly high slash resistance but get cut down easily by thrust attacks. This works better than durability because (1) it's a positive reinforcement and you get the joy of seeing higher damage numbers once you switch instead of frustratingly being forced to switch because a hollow did a jump attack at the last second into your swing and your weapon broke because of it. (2) It actually encourages people to use different weapons instead of switching to a fully-repaired version of the same weapon they were already using.
To wrap this incredibly long post up, this durability glitch makes the game more difficult instead of making it more challenging and I think it should be fixed because of that.