Thank you very much for your detailed feedback!
For point 1, we actually considered several different mechanics, but they all involved keeping the items only in the right side of the screen and we found it's hard to focus on both the scene and the item list at the same time. Once we got the item preview idea implemented, it improved so much on the playability that we decided to stick to this mechanic and put the original ideas on hold for the duration of the jam. If you are interested in what options we considered I covered it in our recent devlog video, it's from 4:48.
Point 2 is also a very good point, we had some ideas on showing the visible range by blurring a bit the rest of the screen for the range for example, but we didn't have enough time in the end to implement these sadly - we were quite new to Unity, so anything which involved a more technical approach like shaders were a bit out of our reach. If we ever continue working on this again, we'd definitely add these!