this is a controversial opinion: auto-menders aren't very good

[pali6]

Patches are single use, there is an inventory management aspect to healing with them automenders get rid of .

You can have an arbitrarily large number of patches in a minipatch box.

auto-menders do trivialise medicine

To have non-trivial medicine we'd probably have to remove healing chems and make it so you need to do surgery or similar stuff for everything.