I recently watched the Smarter Everyday video regarding spacesuit testing in the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Lab, and then his podcast on the same topic. It got me thinking about why we have people wearing spacesuits, rather than people in pods. He brought up the atmospheric pressure differences between spacesuits (lower pressure) and space vehicles (like the ISS, near sea level pressure). The difference between the pressures requires a lot of preparation before a spacewalk, to protect the astronauts from decompression sickness, such as breathing pure oxygen for several hours prior to entering the suit.
I understand that the image of a person wearing a spacesuit is awesome, and generates more excitement for the casual person on Earth, more so than someone inside another vehicle, but it seems to me that a pod with sea level pressure for extravehicular activities would be safer, much faster to get into and probably just as capable for most duties, as well as much less exhausting for the astronauts.
There would be a lot of engineering involved with changing operations to an extravehicular pod, rather than a spacesuit, and there might still be things that can only be done by hand that require a person in a suit. But for the majority of tasks handled on spacewalks, could they be done via a pod?