QoL suggestion: Hotbar for equippable items

[Sunshine.]

Inventory management has been at the core of certain fights ever since they were made, such as Fuelweaver. They require a lot of item switching, which can be very chaotic when the item that was switched off of is now on a different spot than thought.
An example during the Fuelweaver fight would be switching between a weatherpain, the lazy explorer and a dark sword. If there are slots left within the inventory, which can also happen later on as armor, weapons and sanity foods are being used up, the inventory logic might dictate that items go to a different spot than they were before, thus filling up the inventory left to right instead of remaining where they once were.

This happens outside of resource intensive fights as well, even during more calm moments such as farming veggies.

I can't possibly count the amount of times where I was stuck looking through my inventory to figure out where my things went, as they're simply not where I had put them before.

A solution that a friend of mine and me came up with was adding a hotbar to the game. Similar to the quick crafts that can be adjusted freely, said hotbar would be able to let players equip items immediatly by just pressing a single key. They could be adjusted by just drag and dropping items into it and by, say pressing 1, it will equip the lowest percentage item in the inventory into the players hand / body slot / head slot, depending on what item has been set to that hotbar key. This would work for all equippable items in the inventory, including equippable items in backpacks as well.

This feature is already somewhat in the game, working off the first slots of the main inventory. However, it is still plagued by said item movement, and items might switch keys depending on the order of when they were equipped. The hotbar would make this more consistent.

This would make more complicated fights, such as Fuelweaver, easier to handle since all items can be set to a key without the need to find them mid-fight after they moved to another slot. However, it wouldn't just help with these fights but with every task in the game as well. Be that farming, base building, kiting or anything else. Being able to just switch to items at the press of a button would make the game more fun.

For controllers, this concept could be turned into a quick equip circle, allowing to set where items are in the circle and working off the same logic as a hotbar, but aiming left, right, top, bottom etc. to equip items instead.
 
An argument could be made that this would make the game less difficult, however I do not think that difficulty should come from tedious inventory management that is gouverned by a sorting system, which is never explained to the player. A lot of players I met would just recommend to fill up your inventory with items that are not being used up to prevent your equippables from starting to move. And if that's the general solution, than a hotbar would really be a quality of life change.