Why does the new inventory UI show less items on Expanded than before?

[Sindele]

With the new 5x7 layout, the inventory, armoury chest, and saddlebag all share a unified interface. And with four bags instead of five and a half, sorting by tab works a lot better. Also the item search feature now specifies the correct tab while using the expanded layout.

Except for my 8 retainers, who now all have an interface that went up by a page in total - an awkward half-page at that. Very unified.

Also, /isearch specification was actually *more* accurate before once you got over the initial hump of figuring out how it was numbered. All it tells me now is that it is somewhere in a vague mass of 70 items, marking yet another loss of granularity.

[Sindele]

So, for those who haven't seen it, the FFXIV reddit has a translated post from the Lead UI Designer Hiroshi Minagawa on the new layout. (I'm not going to reiterate it here, go read it if you're curious.)

While I understand and accept the technical limitations, I still have to confess that I'm in the camp of those who can't accept it as it is. It's certainly the right technical decision to make, but the burden the current (and still-incomplete) solution imposes upon what is essentially the most vital component of the MMO user experience during the time it will take to implement a superior display solution is a bitter pill to be told to swallow, and I'm not convinced that we couldn't have continued on with a long-term insufficient but short-term superior setup until the new one was more robustly featured.