Originally Posted by
Niwashi
I'm guessing it had to do with items that don't categorize as easily. For instance, in cases where two jobs have mostly separate armour, but share the same belt, they didn't know where to put the belt if it was sorted by job. For this to work, they'd need to stop thinking of it as a categorization of where to place each item, butinstead as a filter of which to show in the list and which to hide. "Just show me the items suitable for job X" doesn't have that issue. A belt used for numerous jobs could be included for each of them.
(It would, however, introduce a difference in the interface between purchasing gear that has job categories, and purchasing other items that don't. Sorting by item type is more universal, since all items have a type.)
Well, it probably wouldn't have helped in that particular instance, since both the healing bracelet and the healing ring would still have both been together in the same section anyway, so you could still have confused them. But there are plenty of similar cases where it would help.