If it works it works, regardless what era it feels like it’s from.
Drag-and-drop and move-to-top as a replacement remove functionality… we’re making the UI less specific and requiring more steps for certain tasks. What if I want to move item 50 to position 10? I either drag past 40 other items and hope I don’t mess up (which can cause me to have to start the process all over again), or I have to click “move to top” and then drag. It’s less exact and requires at least 2 clicks if I’m doing everything perfectly. If we call for the numeric keypad on mobile (which we’re not at the moment), tapping an input and typing 10 seems at least as fast and less prone to error.
I strongly disagree that this is universally true. It depends on the circumstances. The longer a list gets, the more difficult drag-and-drop becomes to use. It’s a fringy but not completely uncommon for sites to have more than a hundred categories. Drag-and-drop only would make category reordering a nightmare for them.
I’d argue that’s it’s not problematic, but almost completely broken if it’s the only option for sites with large numbers of categories.
I’m not completely opposed to drag-and-drop, we just can’t sacrifice numerical input along with it. I don’t think it would be a problem to eliminate the up/down arrows for drag-and-drop, in most cases drag-and-drop is probably nicer than clicking an arrow over and over again.
Totally agree.