Larian wants to focus the game more on the gold drop and unique loot, making you gear up on merchants. But sometimes it feels just as much RNG to try and buy something on merchants, because they have a chance of actually NOT having a piece of gear you need. I spent 4 levels without any bows upgrade because there were no merchants selling it anywhere and never droped any. So why not have fixed merchants with specialized gear? We already have them set with skillbooks anyway, just make them roll the specific gear so we have at least a chance for a small upgrade, which is better than nothing

Please no more vendors.
We already have a shop for each type of skill books and some more shops for equipment. If we add more skills (summoner and polymorph are known) and a shop for each equipment type (sorted by what? Type (dagger, bow, sword, robe, cloth, plate) or attribute (str, fin, int, what about hybrids?)), then every NPC in this game will be a shop. It already feels strange that you start in a prison and half of the prisoners sell you skills or equipment.

In D:OS1 this was less of a problem because you were in a normal town and most shops were located around a hot spot (the market of cyseal or the tavern of silverglenn)

Pretty sure he said to use the already existing vendors with skillbooks to also sell gear respective to their archetypes.

Like the Warfare vendor selling strength-based gear.
The Huntsman and Scoundrel vendors selling finesse-based gear.
The Casters vendors selling intelligence-based gear.

Yeah I'm all up for "skill/class-specific vendor" in terms of gears in case you can't get any decent drops out there. That is: unless they improve RNG but even then, crap happens.