The encumbrance thing is a point: as much as I swore about Tyranny lately (I actually enjoyed it, but was rather, erm, colourful in my critique of some aspects) I liked the way it mostly just used a single party inventory accessible to everyone with no upper limit that I found. It was mostly self-balancing as I needed to keep selling and bartering anyway.
I've felt a similar way about Braccus' maze and prefer not to do it using teleportation at all, but the latest version also seems to make it an essential skill as they've stuck a platform in front of one of the portals, though I may have simply overlooked an alternative means of climbing up there. I guess it kind of fits in with Larian's usual "multiple ways of doing things", though teleportation just seems like a clunky version of the pyramids that we usually end up getting (and which I recall didn't always work, in much the same way as you suggested).
