gear wheel...its old.

[Jedi_pup]

replaces the spiral wheel with a more traditional inventory and a means to access each section as well as see whats on you, by having a faster more obvious means to see your "gear" like  seeing your dragons keys equip and there not at the end of the wheel but right out front and you can see it and remove it and or replace it. all sections dont impede on hot keys it just broken down into squares and still includes a wheel that is dumbed down version, its just so you can pause and boop the icons that you can see. no remembering what degree of how much to rotate or ever mis-clicking an energy pizza on lavos, instead of clicking the Omni tool.

[Pakaku]

It's one of those UI things that works great on console, but is horrible on PC. What you're proposing is great on PC and better IMO, but slow on console... and unfortunately I doubt DE wants to segregate UI types. They ruined arrow-key menu navigation because of that mindset, too.

Best thing we have is gear wheel keybinds, it's just too bad I can never remember which gear slot is which

[(NSW)HedEmpTy]

Yeah, I'm not sure what to do with the gear wheel. I'm a Switch player and it still feels a bit janky, too easy to pull the wrong item, but this might be worse for console players, even if it's much better for PC. And button real estate is so precious and limited on controllers. Wait, hold on...

Taking a page from Dragon's Dogma here, kinda - holding down the ability menu in that game turned your directional arrows from one sub-menu to the other (AI Ally Commands/Item Shortcuts). Warframe could do something similar with gear shortcuts: give the arrow pad on console two menus, depending on if the ability menu button is held. (It already does, kinda, in Railjack, so the functionality is technically already coded in.)

[taiiat]

for PC, i think People will just have to use what's available to them, as making a UI that isn't Controller first is very unlikely.

use the 12 Hotkeys you can Bind from your Gear Wheel to make using your most common items super fast. that's "good enough", in that respect. as long as People have a decent Keyboard rather than the recent trend of People competing to have the smallest Keyboard possible with as many Keys missing from it as possible.