If you try to profit off of every goblin killed in combat it becomes tedious very fast. Sadly all the goblin bows and scimitars can't just turn to gold themselves. Normally I'd ask "How much would you value all these goblin bows". But currently I have to drag them over one by one.
Balancing purchases is the only thing the trade UI has going for it at the moment.
Not sure what's your point exactly, but one of my favorite things about how Pathfinder Kingmaker did inventory management is precisely that it actively discouraged the player from carrying around any piece of gear dropped by enemies, by making their resell value minimal while exacerbating the downsides of carrying around a lot of weight.
Given that you traveled considerably faster with a light inventory, you were actively incentivized to leave the trash loot on the ground and move on. Which mattered a lot when you had some deadline to match somewhere else.
It was mostly done for science. How intuitive is the UI? Can I hoard gold after a few goblin engagement? etc.
Turns out you can drain merchants of their gold selling goblin bows and scimitars. It also highlights how clunky the UI is.
Sadly all the goblin bows and scimitars can't just turn to gold themselves.
Why not? D&D has a lot of ways to focus on the details that are interesting and then abstract away non-salient stuff. If people are just going to go through the tedium of looting all of those bows and scimitars to then turn around and drag them off to a merchant with a bad UI, why make them do that? Just give them the gold and skip the tedium. Maybe one or two bodies have weapons on them, just in the rare case you really need a weapon of some sort right now, but just loot gold from the rest - they can assume that you sold that stuff.
Alternately, give the merchants some measure of self-interest and only have them buy things that they care about. Why in the world would any of the merchants we've seen so far (apart from the one in the goblin camp) actually want a stack of crappy shortbows (or cutting boards or half-burned candles,...)? Just make it so they won't even buy that junk unless it's something that that particular merchant would actually care about.
Part of me was hoping the merchant would turn down goblin bows. Why would a merchant stock items people won't buy?
The game doesn't incentivize selling goblin bows, they're just everywhere and it's nice to just push the button to take all the loot.
So if a player goes through pressing to take all items, they'll be sitting with a surplus of goblin bows. To later be punished for with the merchant UI.
