Originally posted by DarthTanyon:

This subject has been beaten to death since the first day the game came out. The devs apparently refuse to address it and/or don't care. For now there are a couple mods that help. That is your only recourse at the moment.

It has been addressed, the dev response at the time was: no intention to add paper doll/dedicated equipment slots, nor expand the default inventory space.

They serve no real purpose. It's just another screen clutter for the inventory ui.

Let's also address the fact that when games go from unified inventory to split you tend to actually lose total inventory space, because if they didn't remove slots to make room for the equipment only slots, all it effectively did was add more inventory space.

Majority of the players will prefer the unified inventory instead of having inventory space removed for equipment only. You can run around naked/lesser equipped by choice if you want more free space, an option not available with paperdoll.

And for the argument of "Why would they take away inventory space to make up for the paper doll?" Why would they not?, you asked for dedicated equipment slots, not more inventory space, and the devs have also responded to the request for larger inventory space.
The response was use the cart for now, and they were work shopping the idea of have equipped bags either to the player or to a tamed animal like the lox, but flat out expanding inventory was rejected.