Remember this one...?

[Linked Image from i.ibb.co]

One of the things that was so nice about it, as opposed to these MMO inspired "show me everything at once" hotbars, is that it didn't turn the whole bottom of the screen into a rainbow colored panic attack lol.

The quickest way to throw an icepack on a hotbar is to clutter it up with everything and anything. A hotbar is not a spellbook. It's not a scroll case or potion case. It should only be used for what's hot. A hotbar is a place to quickslot the most common and frequently used commands.

If I drink healing potions and cast magic missile all the time, then it makes sense for those to go in a hotbar. But the hotbar shouldn't be the place for everything, such that if a spell or ability or potion isn't in the hotbar that it will likely be completely neglected and forgotten about. This isn't WoW or SWTOR, where we need to see like 100 things on screen at once, and have multiple hotbars that we can cycle through, because everything works on a cooldown keysmashing formula.

D&D and Baldur's Gate weren't like that. Instead they presented this information in a way that was organized and orderly and intuitive. Honestly, BG1 was like a case study in how to organize a bunch of complex D&D stuff in a way that was accessible. The everything hotbar is the absolute opposite of that. It's not only confusing, but also intimidating for the neophyte, because it's showing us way too much stuff at once.