There really isn't any downside to having things pre-sorted like in most other cRPGs.
One of the major things about having a pre-sorted UI for things like spells is that less frequently used spells are more likely to cross your field of vision, and while quickly reviewing them, you may remember something about those skills and spells that offers a potential solution. I know I've already run into that kind of possibility several times while playing the Pathfinder games, PoE, and Solasta. But the saying 'out of sight, out of mind' really applies to the giant hotbar that DOS and BG3 uses. Now that I think back on my hundreds of hours in both games, I don't really consider using anything but my most used tactics in both games, because I'd have to fish through actual menus to even notice everything else, and then take the extra step of manually dragging something I might consider using to the hotbar to even use them to begin with, and then get rid of them after the fact and carefully sort out the hotbar
again in order to keep everything tidy.
You should really look at the keybinds for solasta. Then check out NwN, Kingmaker, whatever elses action bars. You should see numbers on them.
Games a click fest btw, watch any YouTube vid. You trade more clicks with keybinds. Not a good trade.
Cool. We weren't talking about keybinds to begin with, we were talking about actual functional UI design. But I'll humor your argument anyway.
You may click more in Solasta, but it's very precise. As opposed to having to wrestle with things like clicking on a jump button and fishing for an angle that will actually let you jump across for lord knows what reason, when your party members somehow already get to follow you automatically right after you cross. Besides, Solasta's devs will likely add in keybind support later on, as it'd be a trival thing to do compared to having to redesign the UI from scratch, like what many hope BG3 would do later on.
Solasta's dev philosophy was to build from the ground up. Larian choosing to refurbish the DOS2 engine for BG3 trapped them into building from the top down. The latter philosophy is impressive at first and distracts the masses quite well, but it falls apart when people start actually thinking about it, and changing things after the fact becomes a lot harder.
