I agree, it's annoying how it is now. My feeling is it's a bug that was introduced with 1.0.72 rather than a design change. As you can open the inventory the first time and they open up normally (away from the portraits and staggered) it's not until the second time that they both reset to hard left. May sound like a small thing, but the amount of time you spend in inventories (especially in our case of just running 2 characters) it quickly turns to frustration.
I also noticed that when you replace / equip an item, it no longer does a clean swap - the unequipped item now goes to the first available slot... another new bug I think.
