1. Forget food. Remove it altogether from the game. All it does is provide lots of additional item management. If you are going to keep it, for immersion purposes, give it a better, more meaningful purpose and for the love of all that is holy, food should perish after X number of long rests depending on the type of food.
I have seen around here quite interesting suggestion that i really liked ...
Fresh food would give more nourishment ... but it would spoil after few long rests.
Dried (processed) food would give less nourishment ... but it would reamain eatable a lot longer. (And we would only find processed or rotten food in the world.)
Then all we need is option to "pack" processed food to pack of camp supplies.
And voila!
Your inventory can be easily nice and clean.
Resting will be as limited as you want.
And it would even make sense.
I wonder why it was (seemingly) dismissed?
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As for the rest ... i dont like anything about it. :-/