Quite a harmless L&L article today, let's see how we manage to start a fight about it...
I did see myself and my past gaming groups in what the article says about spending too much time when picking equipment, therefore I agree that "starting packages" can be a good thing (3.0 already had them, although by "package" they also means suggested skills and feats).
The limit of a starting package is maybe that if you want to deviate from it, you might have to do some little calculations for removing something from the equipment, get the money back, then replace it with something else. It's not a big deal really, but today's article suggests they might make this even easier by having a few multiple choices, especially for weapons/armor/shield. Overall I think this is probably the best that can be done.
Some players go through the weapons and armors lists, trying to find an optimum choice. One thing I really liked about 3.0 weapons, was that there was instead hardly an optimum choice, and that meant that you could just pick any one weapon from the highest category you had proficiency in, and it would have been a good choice. Not so with armors unfortunately, there really was an optimum armor choice, or more precisely there were several clearly inferior choices, which isn't good.
What typically bogs down equipment selection (note that I'm thinking about 1st level PCs here, so I'm not even including magic items) IMXP, is that there is a large amount of inexpensive mundane items that "might be useful". Stuff that makes light, stuff to eat or drink, stuff to carry other stuff, ropes, sticks, minor chemical substances, stuff for reading and writing... The problem is that if you have even just enough money for half a dozen of these minor items, players start thinking "what could we still possibly add to our equipment that might come in handy", and that can take a long time to decide.
Furthermore, this is exacerbated by the modern tendency of players to think only about themselves, which means
every player at the table is going through the shopping list, without realizing that you only need
one character (traditionally the Rogue) with a backpack full of mundane trinkets that might come handy.