This game has many great things going for it, but one of the worst things I’ve seen in any game is how murder works here. If you kill someone, with no witnesses, people know it was you who killed them. That can’t be an intended feature, it must be a bug.
Regarding the selling stolen items thing, yes it’s annoying but I think it was done as a way to ensure that you don’t get too wealthy. What happens in games like this is that once you’ve passed the initial stage, you begin accumulating lots of money. So much money that you don’t have enough things to spend it on.
I think they could’ve made it slightly harder to sell items by making traders less wealthy than they are, by making the items they want to buy change on a daily basis depending on demand and supply and through having to spend your money almost every day, whether it’s to feed/look after your horse or pay Uncle rent for staying at his house. I don’t have many ideas on how you can make the player have to spend more of his money rather than hoard it and make mid game easy. Every open world game has that problem where you have so much money it’s not worth anything anymore.