Oh man, that sounds like a real pain in the neck, let’s hope we all get some love in the inventory management area! And yeah, using the vault isn’t 100% ideal since it’s still necessary to separate and sort anything with a decay timer before dumping everything in there (well, unless you specifically want tons of putrid meat).
I’d much rather be able to flag certain items as “do not pickup/harvest”, “always inventory”, “never inventory”, “mark for recycling”, etc. Might be better to start a new thread for that though…
EDIT: OK, made a thread for the inventory flag ideas: Inventory Management Flags - #2 by dakka