Originally posted by Nascarman:

The actual game is too easy to not take your items away. It’s how the game generates “difficulty” as without it there’s really no reason to care about death. Place a bed near a boss and you’d be able to cheese every boss in the game as you respawn with no penalty (as after the first death you lose no skills) so there’s 0 reason to prepare around not dying when the consequences are limited.

Honestly that just leads into the second major issue which is how boring the bosses are. But I feel like removing the skill-loss-prevention after death and keeping your stuff would be a better system then what they currently have. That way every single death beats you down, but you don't have to do corpse runs.