Salesforce has been lagging in inline-editing capabilities for a while. When Clari burst onto the scene, that was one of the earlier features that sellers loved - the ability to edit records without having to open them one by one. Even a free version of Scratchpad had better inline-editing abilities.
Salesforce enabled inline-editing in list views, but it is limited to a single record type. That means either an admin created list views for users, or a trainer taught them how to create list views that had a record type filter. Both are not scalable, and the latter is a bit more complicated for a user whose primary job is to sell, not to be Salesforce experts.
Beyond the single record type limitation, not all fields are supported. This Salesforce help page details them out. The standard Next Step would've been supported, except many companies feel 255 characters are not enough, so they have a custom "Next Steps" field that is a long text area. Long text areas are not supported. Sales Stage would've been supported, but most companies create a dependent "Reason" field when something is lost or won, and fields with dependent picklists are also not supported.
Salesforce has since released inline-editing capabilities in reports. Since the Summer '21 release, they have been making improvements to the capability. Unfortunately, apart from the record type and the dependent picklist limitations, the others still exist. You still can't edit Probability directly, nor can you edit long text areas.
And this is causing frustration from the users. Now, should you try to move to the standard Next Step with 255 characters and argue that Next Step should be short and sweet? Probably. But what about other things like Customer Success Notes?
It's a step in the right direction but it's not a full-fledged feature that will make your users jump up and down and be happy about Salesforce Lightning unfortunately. It is a journey, and we're all in it.
