New Fishing/Hunting menu is clunky, takes longer to use, and prevents Ability use :(

[(PSN)Unstar]

This week's Nightwave encouraged me to do Perfect Animal Captures.  I immediately learned that the new UI for fishing is also used for Hunting.  I took a deep, meditative breath, changed my button-bindings so I could use the menu (per this bug), and told myself that I would think positively and give it a try in good-faith.  And I did!  6 Perfect Captures later, I feel ready to offer my feedback.

In short, I dislike the new UI menu for fishing/hunting and I prefer the previous method of selecting these items (ie - when using fishing items, you get the fishing gear wheel, etc) and here's why:

I can't use my Abilities and my Ability/Energy UI is removed.  This wasn't a big deal when I was fishing in an empty cave, but hunting is a different story.  As I'm sure many hunters do, I use Ivara for hunting.  She has a bunch of great Abilities, such as invisibility to prevent sight-detection, her wire arrows to help me quickly get to any vantage point I need to without breaking stealth, and the ability to control my tranq shots mid-flight to ensure they hit difficult targets like Sawgaws.  However, with the new UI, I can't use these Abilites while holding my tranq rifle or an echo-lure.  I do have the option of using my melee weapon, which stows these items and brings the Ability menu back, but I can't do that without actually attacking with a giant deadly sword, which is a big no-no around animals that — with all due respect to Rebecca — I'm trying not to kill.  Plus this extra sword step is unintuitive and clunky (ie - to use Navigator I need to attack with my sword, press R1 to toggle the ability on, then I can switch back to my rifle to do a tranq, then attack with a sword and then press R1 again to toggle the ability off).

The new menu is clunky to use and "slots" must be rebound regularly because there aren't enough slots.  When hunting, I'm constantly needing to change my echo-lure depending on what kind of nest I find.  I can only hot-slot 3 items in the new menu for 6 or 7 different types of animals (each with their own echo-lure), though, so I'm frequently needing to "rebind" what item is where mid-mission.  It's a pain.  And the kicker is, to rebind what's in a slot, it takes me to the old gear menu.  So I use the old gear wheel anyway, but it just takes me longer because I need to use the new menu both before and after the gear wheel; instead of just using the gear wheel to equip the item, I use the new menu with a button-hold which then opens the gear wheel which then changes what's in the new menu slot, so that then I can use the new menu slot to equip the item I want.  It's needlessly complex.

Controller button space is at a premium, and I cannot afford space for the Ability Menu.  Right now the game has revoked my ability to use fishing and hunting items unless I have a controller mapping for the Ability Menu.  This means that if I want to use items, not only do I need a binding for the Gear menu, but I also need a second binding for the Ability Menu.  I cannot stress how much there is not space for this, and it really feels unnecessary to to require two bindings for functionality that previously worked perfectly well with only one binding (the Gear menu).

I appreciate your considering my feedback.  I also appreciate the fact that you tried to innovate and create an even better way for Tenno to access items, but for the above 3 reasons it's falling short of the old one for me.  At the very least, I would love an option to turn this feature off.  Thanks!