Seriously, the old system is useless. Prisoners are at the bottom, ships and weapons are at the top. What else is needed?
On the other hand, when I wanted to buy or sell some pistols, I had to crawl through a gigantic list of items (no, Quick Search is not good enough for this), which took time and I always missed something.
How about a compromise - Wide(ish) rangeing categories.
Ie: Krew (gals and similar), Shipyard (Ship Stuff), Outfits (Trappings and related), Rifles (Rifles, Carbines, Shotguns ect), Pistols (ALL the pistols), Bulky (Big stuff), Close and personal (All close in weapons), Captives (All Prisoners and related items)
And those are just some ideas I had while writeing this post.