Interesting perspective. Well, I'm all for immersion. I like that you can pick up spoons and throw them at enemies. That's a fun thing as well.
I guess the main thing I'm trying to get at, though, isn't so much that they should get rid of spoons and knives and forks. It's more that they should provide purpose for everything. If they provide a Send to Camp and make it easy, for purposes of Quality of Life, which I wouldn't mind, frankly, and they provide Multi-Select to make it easy to send massive quantities of items to camp easily, which I'd also prefer, then they negate the need for Encumbrance at all unless they implement some additional restrictions to when you can Send to Camp and/or they need to provide mundane items some sort of purpose to make you want to carry them on you.
So, in other words, let's say they restrict Send to Camp to Waypoints. You have to physically go to a Fast Travel point to Fast Travel or Send to Camp. That at least provides purpose to Encumbrance. That means you are going to have to determine how much you want to carry on you while you're adventuring until you reach a waypoint. That gives purpose and meaning to you carrying around a bunch of stuff for any period of time. If they allow you to Send to Camp or Fast Travel anywhere and everywhere, there is no need to ever have Encumbrance rules. Just remove them, especially if they make it super quick and easy to Send to Camp. Makes no sense to even have Encumbrance rules if I can easily send excess anything to camp, and if I can Fast Travel quickly to retrieve those items whenever I need them, it is all just wasted mechanics.
