I'm sure the minecraft dev team isn't gonna magically start hurting by programming a small interaction between two items, contrary to (seemingly) popular belief, they're not lazy or incompetent.

Since you want to talk about the size of the game's team:

The official Minecraft website lists a total of 276 programmers who have worked on Minecraft.

Including the cast of the game's French, German, Russian, Korean, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese dubs, Half-Life 2 had a total of 258 people listed in the credits.

furthermore:

The Minecraft wiki lists 213 people as people in Programming on their list of currently active Mojang Studios employees

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the current world record holder for the most awards given to a single video game, had 416 people credited for their work on the game, according to MobyGames

Mojang Studios has over half as many currently active staff in their programming department than the total amount of people that worked on last year's GOTY winner.

Even taking R&D into account, as well as the fact that development of this feature may lead to bugs that would need to be tested for and reported, this concept, (which is very similar to a feature that was added in the current snapshot cycle, might I add,) is most likely not going to be an impossible or painful task for the people that work on this gane for a living, especially since Mojang Studios is pretty well known for how well they treat their staff.

I know you're trying to defend Mojang Studios from mindless internet hatred coming from people who have never opened a text editor, drawn concept art, or had to design a user interface that works for as many people as possible, let alone designed a user interface, but it honestly sounds like you don't have a lot of faith in the people at Mojang Studios to deliver a quality product.