Switch Talking to villagers is incredibly unintuitive

[hayseedcommander]

After buying this for my daughter on Switch I noticed she was never talking to villagers - only gifting. I tried it myself and found that I could not easily talk to villagers either. The primary action button would always be gifting the currently held item and there is no obvious way to hold nothing. Navigating the inventory skips empty slots. But regardless - an empty slot should not be required to talk to someone. At one point she discovered that when holding a tool the primary action would be to talk because you can't gift tools. However holding a tool is also a pretty frustrating an unintuitive requirement for talking to someone. She wasn't always holding tools and as a result was still not talking to anyone.

I attempted scouring wikis and the internet multiple times to try to figure out why it is so difficult when it is supposed to be a basic and common action. After finding no helpful information I took to the official subreddit where I was given the following options:

1. Turn on Item Stowing, which lets you put your held item away with the Y button.
2. Always carry a tool..
3. Upgrade your backpack. Once you upgrade your backpack you can use the shoulder buttons to swap between your inventory rows, which makes it easier to get to an empty item slot

While this information is helpful, I can't help but feel like these options are abysmal and should not be required just to talk to a villager! There are 4 obvious buttons on the switch controller (and plenty more than that). Why can't one of them be for talking and another be for gifting? I am at a loss for the design of these controls and cannot see this as anything other than a frustrating design flaw. It took us days to figure out how to reliably talk to villagers which requires bizarre and unintuitive pre-requisites. Why?