No item properties are displayed prior to adding an item to the anvil. This becomes a significant issue when working with a number of identical item types (e.g. enchanted books) because items must be added and removed from the anvil to view potential items AND because items returned to inventory are added at the top of the list, shifting the layout of previously reviewed items. (The latter makes it difficult to work around)
Items in anvil slots only show properties briefly when added. To review those properties, the item must be removed and added again.
If these are the designed behaviors, then the issue could solved by displaying the properties of the item under the cursor (in inventory or the anvil) in the same way that information is displayed for items in the hotbar. If differences in touch versus controller selection complicate this, maintaining the order of the items in inventory might net a similar result.
Comments 3
I'll reword it to focus on the problem described, first.
The potential fixes could be deemed feature requests, which are often tracked in issue-tracking systems, but the core issue of poor information display in the anvil UI is either a code defect bug (if that information is supposed to be displayed, but is not) or a design/usability bug (because it causes significant issues for the user).
So, if you want to resolve it as by-design or won't-fix, I can understand, but invalid implies that it doesn't describe an issue with the product.
I totally agree with you but this is a bug tracker, whose sole purpose is to reports bugs not improvement requests. Please post your claim to the forum or reddit as a feature request instead.