One thing I remeber when I first started playing was that I could trade for Chips, which as a low lvl character I could easily find and collect to trade for items.

Maybe having some more ingenious ways to get items or unique elements to items would be cool, but I think taking away the need to go out and kill things for items might defeat the point of the game though, people would just stand in town and deal with the vendors or create "vendor hacks"

I think there should be more secret levels aswell, maybe like the cow level there could be a Diablo level, totally impossibly hard and full of around 50 Diablo's but a killer place to find items hehe.