Obviously an inventory has to take up space
somewhere; what else would you do with it? A little complaint of mine is that it closes up every time you look at an item, although the time wasted there in the whole of Season 1 was probably less than the time it took me to write about it
Still...
On the main topic, I agree it should be possible to combine items. I'm not sure if this makes things harder, I mean, Grim Fandango didn't have the option to combine and I found it the hardest of all the Lucasarts games. I feel it makes solutions to puzzles more interesting, though. What I'd also like to see is more items! The whole season gives us about as much content as a single large game, but when I think about how large games can require you to go into multiple full-screen inventory pages, it's clear that we don't get 1/6 of that number in each episode.