@Aether
I'm losing stamina here, so just a few points,
It isn't an imagined problem, or maybe I just go into that menu more often. The other day I loaded up Tears for the first time in ages and I needed to produce a Korok frond. If you sort by type, you have to scroll way past the monster parts, if I remember correctly. And they're quite useful situationally, but too situational to be that high in most used. Similarly, I'd frequently run out of keese eyeballs and try to find various elemental aerocuda ones instead, so all the eyeballs are kind of, in a mess far from the left if I sort by most-used. They're not together. They probably are if they sort by type, but the monster parts are very far to the right then. Maybe it's just a play style thing, I dunno. I also have, like, almost twice the hours you have, so maybe I have that much more stuff. I assure you, I didn't make the issue up, the reason I used Tears of the Kingdom as an example is BECAUSE I had a particularly frustrating play session with it recently.
Precision depends on the size of the icons, sure, but between 4-4.5 is still big enough to have a good number of icons that are somewhat easily tappable. This screen size is still far larger than the DS. The current Tears of the Kingdom inventory has 5 items per row, which would give each item a maximum of 1.8cm of horizontal screen space on the second screen assuming a 4:3 aspect ratio, far more than the 1cm typically recommended for touch UI elements, almost twice the size of the icons on my phone home screen (I measured, lol), and
way larger than the touch zone for a keyboard character on a smartphone's virtual keyboard. What you need to factor is this is a specific-purpose screen that doesn't require extraneous chrome or fluff, the necessary elements can contextually take full advantage of the real estate. And one reason they can scale intelligently is because that real estate is a guaranteed set size, density and ratio. You would lose some of that advantage if you just get people to use their smartphones, with their various screen sizes, OS UI and display densities (and generally I think they're too big for this purpose anyway). In that scenario, the experience is no longer uniform.
All my problems are indeed late game problems because that's where I've been for the past hundred hours lol. But still feel all games would benefit, at any point, I've very often imagined interfaces that could be streamlined with touch elements, or gameplay scenarios that would benefit from parallelism. I'm very much a "two monitor" advocate for work. I remember playing the Pikmin 3 Deluxe challenges, which require you to have really tight control over your teammates and know where they are and what they're doing and to keep them productive, know when a set of Pikmin have completed their assigned task and returned to base, and I really wished I had a second scree- Then I found out that's how it worked on the Wii U.
Finally, I think the Switch shares charge with the joycons, which can come into play if you use them detached than re-attach. It's not a big deal, honestly, but the joycon thing is just an example. Yes, we're gaining a screen, but we're losing the necessity of having an 1 extra radio, 1 extra rumble motor, 1 extra battery, one extra accelerometer, one extra gyroscope and one seperate PCB and housing to put it all together. A screen is still more expensive in both power and cost (probably), but my point is that we're not going from a very simple and elegant solution to a complex one, the joycons are already complex, way more complex than a regular controller, and the Switch in its hybrid nature is more complex than a static console. The question is how much utility does the complexity bring?
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