Hermes

if you could buy any amount you wanted to, how would farming be a useful skill.. that would completely ruin the purpose of the skill, seeing its pretty much the only usefull stuff u can create using farming..
perhaps sunshades for druids 2..

also iirc the npc has w.e the player sells to him + he regains some himself(not alot tho)

Having NPC sell all resources necessary to raise skills is what partially made them worthless. Hermes is a player based vendor meaning he will only sells what players sell him + a little of his own if he's (almost) out of stock.

The problem was that despite the limited supply of NPCs there was no automatic system pricing them. If the cost of holding up an NPC went up every day by a certain amount, and then went down when nobody controlled the NPC I suspect this could have worked.

I was of the opinion that the addition of the market in current client made the player-owned NPCs useless.  They were neat, but really nothing more than status symbols and, for the most part, the farms and NPCs didn't change hands very many times until the server files got leaked and people were being hacked.