Gilmoy you're right, but this still doesn't solve the issue with the pop-up in the crafting screen, when you craft an item.  It's pretty much useless by mid-game, and pop-ups are inherently annoying.  So why have it?

mqpiffle,

I agree that the popup for item distribution is quite useless. Therefor i simply ignore it and later distribute the items from the equipment window for a selected hero/unit.

SD might as well remove that popup.

Eek, a bug. Crush it, squash it ...

No wait, it lets me cheat, so sssshhh, don't tell anyone. Maybe they won't notice it, so it will not be removed.

Real Men Draw Pictures With Their Extra Gems!

RPGs (and fantasy 4Xs) generally lack the concept of a party-level equipment UI that allows for convenient redistribution of stuff.  They all reduce to click-level interactions, which scales up poorly.

• Let mannequin denote a unit's torso-like layout of boxes, into which you can equip stuff.  Diablo started it, and every RPG-like uses it now (including SK).
• An "ideal" UI would be something like ... a dynamic graph editor, with each node = 1 unit's entire mannequin (shrink if necessary), plus one pool in the middle.
• You could also define a clotheshorse (? -- hehe), which would be a template / slice / layer of stuff that partially fills a mannequin ... e.g. a set of equipment that should all stay together (but the set is draggable as one atomic unit).  Already, that lifts the level way higher than clicking every item in the set 1 at time.  (In C, this is a struct.)
• When several characters convene, this UI pops up, and you can drag-and-drop entire clotheshorses of stuff between them, or to/from the pool.
• Because the UI is, at heart, graph-based, it automatically scales to the number of entities involved.

That'd also work for ... GC* n-way diplomatic agreements, k-way cargo transfers between ships in a space hex, and any other situation in which you distribute patterns of stuff between n > 2 parties.  The first game that goes there will create a new epoch.  (And then our descendents would write: that game started it, and all genres use it now)  "Clothes"horses could also address the inventory-spam problem, in the same way that having folders in your OS shell solves the flat list of files problem.

Then the (meta-)issue becomes: what proximity (or other hierarchical organization) do you use to limit the scope of such interactions?

• RPG: Same room, or same castle.
• Space cargo: Same hex / planet.
• Sorcerer King: same map (should maybe be: same city?  same ZOC?  same army?)
• Imagine it from the Sorcerer King's pov: while he was winning his game, his enemies surely traded among ... same-alliance of many nations?  He had to counter that by allocating favor among ... same-lieutenant stacks?  i.e. some scopes are abstract or social, not in a metric space (or spacetime).
  

SK's equipment-teleporting is a byproduct of the fact that it defines no intermediate level of proximity.  Everybody is connected to everybody else through the global stuff pool.  This is maybe not even a problem, just odd.

• As you note, eventually you have an excess of good stuff, so this feat ceases to matter.
• Hence, it's just a short-term exploit that slightly overpowers the player in the early mid-game.  But that's OK; since SK is asymmetric, the player should be overpowered.  You will be crushed and yanked like an insignificant beachworm in other ways.

Getting back to the OP's original gripe: the post-crafting popup is exactly what I'd expect from a "click-level UI".  It's exactly a click-level, one-at-a-time, local-only perspective, right?  It's the easy thing to provide.  What you really want might be to see the entire graph-UI of the whole world first, so that you could sweep your gaze over everything (even across many scopes that cannot actually trade), and then decide what need is most urgent.  Right?  We're basically doing that in our heads by memory whenever we craft.  Ironically, I don't mind the pop-up because it's so far from ideal that I don't rely on it to be useful.  I maintain the graph in my head, and then the pop-up might even save me a couple of clicks.

and don't forget that the same item that works for a single unit also works for a group if three