Whetstone and Chalk

Funny that this player is OK with micromanaging spell components but not gear.  How Ironic.

The original discussion is why did WotC decide to remove items that have been on equipment lists for decades.  The most common actual answer I have seen in table bloat. As if a few extra kilobytes of data will break Hasbro's budget.  Ridiculous.  The answer should have basically been, "Because they are stupid."

Quote from Moxys >>

The original discussion is why did WotC decide to remove items that have been on equipment lists for decades.  The most common actual answer I have seen in table bloat. As if a few extra kilobytes of data will break Hasbro's budget.  Ridiculous.  The answer should have basically been, "Because they are stupid."

Remember, physical books exist, and everything you put in a book is taking up space that you can't use for something else. My only issue with removing chalk is that there are so many more deserving things for removal.

Quote from Moxys >>

The original discussion is why did WotC decide to remove items that have been on equipment lists for decades.  The most common actual answer I have seen in table bloat. As if a few extra kilobytes of data will break Hasbro's budget.  Ridiculous.  The answer should have basically been, "Because they are stupid."

 
As has already been pointed out to you multiple times now it's not a website thing. It's a physical printing thing. Every word, every space of every page, has a cost. The less words, the less pages - the less cost to make the book. When making the physical book they also have to think about how much content versus how much cost. Add more content in one place then you need to reduce content somewhere else to avoid inflating the cost. This becomes particularly relevant when you're hiring artists to make more artwork. Also, due to how mass book production works, books are made in set number of sheets called "signatures" - even if you're one page over, you end up paying for the whole signature (for bigger books typically 16 or 32 pages per signature). So content volume needs to match the number of signatures to avoid paying for many blank pages. Cutting back to avoid a mostly blank signature can be a saving of about $30,000 or so in a single printing run. And a book can have multiple printing runs. 

For you, content management of a book might seem stupid. But for WotC they are large and important decisions which affect many thousands of dollars. And this is just the oversimplified quickie explanation - it is actually a far greater and more complex thing than I can give words to.

Just because you don't understand how it works doesn't mean you get to call other people stupid. So, no, the answer is most assuredly not them "being stupid". 

I wouldn't say no one wants to play a game where every round of ammunition and pound of rations is tracked. I'm sure some folks like to play that way, and some folks might want to do a game like that once in a while as a change of pace. But this is absolutely the kind of thing that has to come up in session zero and everyone has to be on the same page about. And I don't think that session zero talk is going to go super well if the DM's vibe is "if you say you use something extremely common and practically worthless that isn't written on your character sheet I'm not going to let you because you're being lazy."