No further benefits ? what the ..

thats so lazy

Why? Handful of players, those who have been playing since the premiere have guru 50, and usually only in cooking and processing, i.e. typical afk activities.
Conclusion: for 99% of BDO players, it doesn't matter that there are no bonuses above guru 50 because they will never reach guru 50 anyway. So changes should be made to life skills:
- significantly increase received life skills exp
- significantly reduce amount of life exp required to lvl up life skills
- offer players a sensible life skills exp event, eg. 500-1000% life skills exp bonus.

Really hinges on if they kept track of your exp after 50. Like I know one who's been guru 50 cook for years and kept cooking imperial meals all that time and if he's lvl 51 after maint and the other guy I know who for some reason made 2 guru 50's is like guru 63 after maint way ahead of the 1st guy then the ldrboards will be a shitshow.

That's not even taking into account the guy w 19 shai's who had 19 energy pools and got to take full advantage of buffs on them not ticking down plus shai extra exp bonus vs the guy who used 1 char w one energy pool.

Then of course supposedly theres a ton guru 50 fishers on season who just sat there fishing since the change but i haven't been on season in 4ever so can't confirm that  which would mess w any fishers who just fished on reg channels.

We'll see I guess

Merging lifeskills levels to family-wide is just step one. They will definitely add some extra benefits in another update... what's the point in expanding to Guru 100 if there won't be any benefits to it ever? It's not lazy - implementing new things isn't done at the snap - it takes time to make and then time to test it all out. Even item simplication is being done in several steps and updates. 

Okay, so "without further benefits" means the cap on 2000 mastery remains the same, but we will get those extra 5 mastery per level at least?

I still don't like the whole idea of family-wide lifeskill levels at all. There's just no way that many of us don't lose out on life fame - especially when that fame is spread over several characters now. Also, as someone said before: it's fun levelling up the skills at the lower levels, because it's fairly quick. Now you'll have that experience only once. And after that, I fear, it'll be be quite discouraging when you're stuck  family-wide somewhere between Master to Guru level with no real incentive or noticable progress.

Gear's also a big factor. Sounds nice, in theory, e.g. that you can gather with any of your charatcers and don't have to level gathering on them seperately, but then again, for really doing effective gathering you also need to move around your manos equipment, toolbag, tools and everything. Some gear, like canape clothes for cooking are also character bound. In the end it's probably still more effective to have a dedicated character for lifesillks, which makes the whole merge fairly pointless.