As Item Management will now have to interact with a number of systems - merchants, camping, item creation, theft and so on, it actually makes sense for Larian to hold off on tossing any substantive changes to it (and it's U/I), until they have a more definitive, final plan for those systems - otherwise they would have to go back and modify Item Management-U/I every time they made a change to any of those systems. Once they are at the point all those systems are mostly resolved, it is much easier to implement an overarching Item Management system. For example, until the current EA build, there would have been no reason to tie food management to camping through item management. Until they add the ability to create potions - and determine what items are needed to do so - there would be no need to tie it to item management.
With all the beakers, astrolabes, crucibles, scales, mortars, pestles and the like we find, I personally wouldn't mind if we could actually USE some of them to outfit a "lab" at some point for such a purpose, use others as ingredients for potions and so on. All this would require further modification to an Item Management system. I WANT to see the rope I find become usable to aid in climbing. If I ever ran an assassin character, I would love to see if I could use one of those damnable forks to "put a fork in a goblin and see if he's done" (but just once - too much of a good thing is never fun).
I might of course be wrong, but it just makes sense to finalize sub-systems like these before trying to finalize the master system that directs/feeds the sub-systems.
I'm working under the assumption that the current "Item Management" and U/I are simply a pre-alpha placeholder, and hopefully we get a solid "alpha" of such Item Management by end of the year.
