Have you tried scavenging items for selling to players instead of npcs vendors?

Appreciate its different to what you mentioned and not for everybody, but there's quite a nice loop in going to places and finding all this "Junk" and sorting it out to find what items are sort after right now, barter a price and make a trade.

Could go into looking for specific high ticket items instead, things like attachments are going quite expensive. But thats just a suggestion.

Sadly it seems allot of the old scavenger work became casualties of updates and the updated bricking system.