Many requests want the same items, and with quantities of around the maximum amount you can hold at one time, therefore if there was a way that you could partially complete help requests by supplying individual elements of the help request, then when exploring you're not going over maximum stacks of items that can be submitted to different help requests.
It would make it more fun, seeing more progress on long help requests, knowing you only have to supply 1 more item, or whatnot.
