You’re linking to an image, not an article. Or are you just trying to tease us with the headline and make us search it up ourselves?

Merwyn already pointed out that replacement picks are cheap and weightless. Regarding the number of dice, every PF2 campaign I’ve been a part of (which is two, so a pretty small sample size) has just had the rogue roll for each tumbler right up front. Need 5 successes, roll 5 dice. If any of them are a critical success, it offsets a critical failure (in addition to counting for two tumblers as normal); otherwise, each critical failure = -1 replacement pick. It’s meant on average 2-3 sets of rolls per lock, rather than 7-8, and keeps things moving at a fine clip.

I think taking a minute to pick an average lock, or 2 minutes to pick a good lock is pretty reasonable, personally. What’s weird is the fact that in PF1 / D&D, it can be done in 6 seconds, most of the time. That’s just inhumanly fast. If you break a pick (at a cost of 3sp, assuming common tools and that you just replace the pick rather than bothering to try to repair it), that’s not really a big deal - any rogue worth their salt should be carrying spare picks, anyway.

Is it realistic to expect to break a pick on 60% of lock you pick? No, not really, but this is a game, and we already do a lot of things that are unrealistic. As a GM, if I had a player complaining about this, I’d consider letting them take longer to pick the lock (perhaps doubling or tripling the completion time) in exchange for the threshold to critically fail being slightly lower (by 5 points or so), to represent more meticulous work in an effort to specifically avoid breaking tools - but really, the cost is so minimal, I don’t really see any reason that this should be needed (except in a case where picks are for whatever reason not readily available, and where time is no real object, such as picking the lock on shackles or something.)

I don’t know of a feat that does that, but I strongly doubt this would be a balance concern. Treat wounds and battlefield medicine are pretty limited anyway, and certainly aren’t game-breaking. I’d draw a comparison to bards’ Hymn of Healing, which amounts to free, unlimited healing with a 10-minute-per-8-hp-per-2-levels use timer, and also costs a single feat to obtain.

Exactly this - it’s actually fortunate, because you can clearly see it coming, so you’ve got plenty of time to job hunt. When you find something, don’t feel bad at all about bailing on the current one.