Which is why they never should've run away from the original XCOM formula.
Personally, I think the original XCOM formula was
shit. The game was (and still is) fun to play, but the inventory micromanagement minigame is definitely something I'm glad the new XCOM did away with. You hand-pick eighty items to carry in the Skyranger with every single ammo clip tracked and counted. At the start of the mission, you must manually assign every soldier to wield their weapons and ammo, because the computer can't handle it, and will give the rocket launcher to the guy with the lowest strength. Which is bad, since if a guy is carrying too many items, he will move slower. You can't view soldier stats while equipping squad, so you have to remember to check them back in the base, and keep track of them on your own. You can't view the encumbrance limit ANYWHERE, and if you want to know how many time units a certain load will shave off a soldier, you will have to test it yourself. Once in the field, every grenade and medkit is stored in some specific pocket on a soldier's body, and moving things from your hands to the backpack and back takes time units. (Want to know how many time units? Why don't you try and see? And then write it down because there's no other way to find out.) And grenades are not flawlessly accurate, and the only way to know a soldier's throwing range is to throw one. Before you do that, though, you need to prime the grenade to explode after a choosable number of turns. Primed the grenade already, but then discovered that the sectoids were too far away? Sucks to be you. Oh, and every single item also takes storage space in your base, and you need to build additional closets every now and then. This is not good inventory design.
I did like the ability to grab things off the battlefield, though. It'd be cool if the new XCOM had that.
Yeah but when you can get in a single exchange more then all the countries COMBINED fully protected can give you... for 7 plasma pistols... something they themselves could obtain.
Where would they obtain plasma pistols? The XCOM obtained its prototypes by killing a bunch of sectoids, studying their corpses to figure out the theory of stunning an alien, doing some more studying to figure out the
practice, waiting for some more sectoids to start wrecking shit, giving one of the experimental never-before-tested stun guns to a soldier and telling him to run up to a sectoid and zap it. If they could pull that off, why would they even need the XCOM? You're the only one fighting the alien menace with any degree of success, and thus have a monopoly on all the cool alien loot.