now's a good time to talk about a future option in future svn: there is a "rental" ability within items where items automatically disappear after a x amount of time since the time of item creation. You can theoretically set the broken pick to only go away after a certain amount of time, thus totally slowing down your mining progress due to dead weight, yet it won't cost your a dime or any inconvenience... except not being able to mine due to a cart full of dead picks.
Same can theoretically be applied to fish by making fish "rot" (rental timer expiring) to give potion a further edge since they got endurance and longetivity, where fish rots and goes away after blah time.
That's an option, but then the problem is using new commands in the item script may produce crazy errors since... it's new commands and it's eA that we're talking about.