[stuff about QoL vs cheats, developer options, and loaded dice]
What makes this more complicated is that carry weight is used to limit your inventory options. Without it the player can carry a bunch of explosives (barrels and stuff) which is a bit of a cheat. Loaded dice is a bit of a cheat too, I guess...
This brings us back to asking what is quality-of-life and what is a cheat. The developers could leave a way to access developer options (I remember doing this most recently in Sims 4 from the console) which is basically "cheat mode". Or we could rely on this feature being included in a mod. I understand why anyone would want to turn of encumbrance but making it a togglable option seems out of place, you know?
Accessing developer options seems most appropriate, I think, in this case. It lets you know that you are breaking the rules - tipping the balance of the game's difficulty in your favor - but the ability to do so is there if you want it. Now that I think about it, does anyone know if there is a console we can access in the game in it's current state? I just realized that I haven't even tried to do this yet.
It's been a while since this has been talked about, but as of patch 4 BG3's "loaded dice" option actually gave a distribution
more consistent with a random d20 roll than the default die roller. BG3's non-loaded dice produced streaks where a low result was preferentially followed by another low result (and the same for high results), and produced statistically higher amounts of 17s and less 6s? So, if anything,
not using BG3's loaded dice is cheating. I have no idea if Larian has made changes to their loaded or unloaded dice rng since then (they updated loaded dice in hotfix #10 but I think my analysis included this...maybe?)...if someone wants to give me ~700+ unbiased rolls I'll do the statistics.
But anyway, back to the topic. I agree that removing encumbrance entirely is basically a cheat, but honestly a pretty harmless one assuming you're not exploiting this for barrelmancy. There aren't that many heavy non-barrel things in the game that you actually use in combat/dialogue. A toggle to group encumbrance (again assuming non-barrelmancy) is almost entirely a QoL chance because it mainly removes tedious inventory management steps without affecting gameplay/balance/difficulty that much. Especially given fast-travel.
I am generally in favor of toggle options for everything, with the acknowledgement that some things are not balanced for. There could be a list of game settings that are under the heading "BG3 was not balanced for any changes to these settings, so your gameplay experience with them may vary." You click that box and can toggle away!
