1 hour ago, Riamus said:The thing that I think gets overlooked often in these discussions about glass jars is that the thing people don't like is that they can't gather water from a water source anymore. They could have kept that mechanic and still gotten rid of glass jars and I doubt many people would have complained that the jars disappeared. I think the issue isn't really about glass jars but about the mechanic of getting water being changed.
Zematt above has explicitly mentioned that he has an issue with missing containers. And my impression is different, I also see many players specifically complain about the jars being gone, and also many that complain about both.
According to Roland water jars were specifically removed to remove jars 😉. I.e. to make all jars, bottles and cups "equal". A second objective was to make water a somewhat valuable resource instead of triviallly infinite. For that they had to put a shackle on the infinite sources called lakes. Maybe there are other ways to do that, but TFP came up with this rather straightforward way.
So no, they could not have kept the mechanic. With endless bottled water from lakes they would have to throw lots of complications in the processing of this water to reach similar goals.