That's an interesting idea. Would you just be interesed in seeing the items as easy as possible, or also faster interaction on them? One thing I imagined from your description was to alter the inventory icon to a preview of the item images, like this:
|i|x|
|x|x|
Is that going in the right direction? :-D
I made some quick pitures with the general ideas.
^^ The equip and drop buttons can be added to there perspective parts as needed^^
For the lower 2 you could simply click on the item to change it.
Hey thanks for sharing! Currently it's planned to do a new iteration of the interaction design after v1.0 is finally out. In best case there will also be some usability tests with users!
I added your suggestions for the item access to this ticket in my backlog. But its a rather mid-term thing :-)