Doing some more research into my characters and I apparently made less use of this "feature" than I thought I did, especially now that you can't stack multiple Celestial Stone-type items for more damage.
Only two-three of my slots are impacted in worst case. Again, I'll manage.
Social slots aren't wacky, they were just free slots.
See, I want to argue with this, because it kind of got into that special kind of unintended gameplay where you figure something out and you feel clever for figuring it out, but it's not something inherently broken. I would often do things like this with my inventory just to make managing my accessories mid-combat or mid-invasion easier, and it made the game more engaging for me.
If I felt I didn't need knockback immunity, I swapped out my Shield for an Emblem.
If I felt I didn't need flight, I swapped out my Hoverboard for another Emblem.
I had no reason to take off the Cross Necklace nor the Warrior Emblem, so they didn't have swaps on them. These were actual, bonafide Vanity slots.
If I needed to use a healing item, I'd swap in Charm of Myths to use it then swap back to my Neptune's Shell.
If I wanted a quick boost to healing while idling, I'd swap on the Shiny Stone over my Fire Gauntlet because that'd be a clear difference between combat and idling.
However, the biggest thing here is this -
my swap with the Charm of Myths is still a valid swap because it has a sprite. None of my other swaps are still valid because Emblems and Shiny Stone don't have one.
It is consistent in that it has a sprite, thus it technically can be a vanity item. But it is
inconsistent in that some actual, functional accessories get what feels like a free pass
because they do have a sprite.
Now if I want to do this I have to manually open my inventory, drag an accessory to a specific slot, click that specific slot, then equip it. Versus just pressing Esc, right clicking, pressing F to heal, right clicking again, and pressing Esc to go about my business.
Which led to people demanding the ability to "turn off" social slots so they could use them for storage but not have to see the items in them.
.. Yikes. Gamers are weird.
We are looking into some UI changes to make it a little more apparent to the player why accessories cannot be put here, but I do not believe it is going to be reverted.
I'll accept whatever the final outcome is. I'll adapt, and I truly do appreciate all the time and effort that's gone into this free update.
But this change, if you ask me, is for the worse.
More intrusive than Torch luck is.