Because it means you as the player have to figure shit out and sometimes what you thought was just junk ends up being useful fi the game designer is clever enough to build the possibility for the player to organically figure things out. If you over-systematize everything it can pull the player out of the experience.
Also, I am...90% certain that the dryad acorns were droppable at any point because I know for certain that I've stuffed them into a bag of holding before. You're thinking of things like the portal key in spellhold, stuff that was absolutely critical to advancing through an area where backtracking was not an option. Locking familiars to a specific slot was pretty annoying though, I'll give you that.
I play the original version exclusively and have since launch. I'm pretty confident in my knowledge of that game. There's only a handful of items that are locked into an inventory slot. It's very much the exception.
While I can sympathize with your frustrations regarding inventory management, I still say that disguising the distinction between critical quest items and generic vendor trash has a place within good game design, but only if you design around it. I'm thinking specifically of my own experience with Planescape Torment in this regard, in which I got an item that was plot related and then swiftly relegated to a bauble of no importance after the corresponding plot advancement. Given how little narrative attention was paid to it from that point on I could have simply dropped or sold it. Because I'm a hoarder though, I kept it for the rest of the game and there was some pay off for that. However it was an active choice I had to make, rather than it simply being another item in some array of quest related trinkets that the game managed for me. It created an organic experience of "ah ha! I was right to hang onto this for the last 60 hours of gameplay even though it stopped being relevant 10 hours into the game." I wouldn't have had that pay off if I wasn't given the freedom to be frustrated by inventory management and the opportunity to throw away a perfectly good quest item. It made the use of it so much later in the game feel so much more meaningful because it was rewarding player agency.
There's a lot of bad game design out there and bad game design will ruin any system, but don't mistake bad game design for bad system design. There's overlap, but they aren't actually synonymous in my opinion.
Because it means you as the player have to figure shit out and sometimes what you thought was just junk ends up being useful fi the game designer is clever enough to build the possibility for the player to organically figure things out. If you over-systematize everything it can pull the player out of the experience.
Also, I am...90% certain that the dryad acorns were droppable at any point because I know for certain that I've stuffed them into a bag of holding before. You're thinking of things like the portal key in spellhold, stuff that was absolutely critical to advancing through an area where backtracking was not an option. Locking familiars to a specific slot was pretty annoying though, I'll give you that.
I play the original version exclusively and have since launch. I'm pretty confident in my knowledge of that game. There's only a handful of items that are locked into an inventory slot. It's very much the exception.
While I can sympathize with your frustrations regarding inventory management, I still say that disguising the distinction between critical quest items and generic vendor trash has a place within good game design, but only if you design around it. I'm thinking specifically of my own experience with Planescape Torment in this regard, in which I got an item that was plot related and then swiftly relegated to a bauble of no importance after the corresponding plot advancement. Given how little narrative attention was paid to it from that point on I could have simply dropped or sold it. Because I'm a hoarder though, I kept it for the rest of the game and there was some pay off for that. However it was an active choice I had to make, rather than it simply being another item in some array of quest related trinkets that the game managed for me. It created an organic experience of "ah ha! I was right to hang onto this for the last 60 hours of gameplay even though it stopped being relevant 10 hours into the game." I wouldn't have had that pay off if I wasn't given the freedom to be frustrated by inventory management and the opportunity to throw away a perfectly good quest item. It made the use of it so much later in the game feel so much more meaningful because it was rewarding player agency.
There's a lot of bad game design out there and bad game design will ruin any system, but don't mistake bad game design for bad system design. There's overlap, but they aren't actually synonymous in my opinion.