Pipes will fail. Wires will fail. Ducts will fail. Maybe not in 5 years, but over the span of 20, they will. Why make them so frustratingly inaccessible?
I have seen another method for making walls that were accessible though, from a homesteader/ hand tool woodworker and carpenter. His walls were 24” thick with huge areas for piping and electrical and had 4x4’ removable wood panels.
And then you have to match the surrounding paint, which is all but impossible since even if you have the same color, the original will have likely faded over the years, making your newly applied coat a mismatch, so now you have to paint the entire wall (no fun when it's a big wall). And if you had wallpaper instead of paint, good luck to you unless you saved some extra scraps.
All in all, an access panel would make the job much simpler.
But there really aren’t many walls you need to open in a house. There is probably 2-3 wet walls, so unless you need to retrofit some ducting why are you opening a wall? Code says there are no hidden wire junctions, so you’ve just got continuous runs of romex that are secured before they terminate… what do you open a wall for?
Most of the drywall repair is just physical damage to the drywall itself.
Drywall is not too bad to deal with. And 99% of the wall surface doesn't need to be opened for a -long- time.
Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
And for telecom / low voltage, you have a lot of freedom of how you do it.
There are a lot of downsides though. You lose airsealing, if you don't have an airtight building envelope on the outside of the drywall. You lose fire resistance. You often lose aesthetics, although I've seen this done extremely tastefully. You lose childproofing, and run the risk of a kid electrocuting themselves or destroying your plumbing or dropping stuff in the wall. You impose constraints on what can go on the walls and where your furniture can go.
Given that drywall is pretty easy to cut and replace, most people figure it's just not worth the costs for something you do infrequently.
Personally I've been printing snap in access panels whenever I have to get into a wall these days - in white PETG they pretty much disappear into the wall for me.
This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial.
We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
As I recall, wasn't PB basically a single vendor, too? Finding PB-to-anything-else adapters at Home Depot was like going on a treasure hunt. Sizing is different, so you really need something actually built for PB. And probably end up with sharkbites. If I were shopping for a house right now and found it had been plumbed with PB, I'd just turn around and walk away.
It just takes one rat.
I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me.
Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.
Something less heavy, easier to fix without expertise, doesn't require applying some surface pattern to hide imperfections when used on a ceiling.
I guess something conceptually like a drop-ceiling (which has a "finished" look, but is very accessible for maintenance), except for walls. That's what we need.
Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.
Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?
In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.
Conduit all the things and paint to match?
It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done.
It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere.
The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.