Whichever person at Viz decided that when publishing in English that instead of having one Yugioh Manga we’re going to have three separate sub-distinguished manga (Yugioh, Yugioh Duelist, and Yugioh Millennium World) for which the volume and chapter numbering is going to arbitrarily start over, thereby making it a huge pain in the ass every time you want to find/cite to specific chapter, is on my shitlist btw
I know why they did this because I was getting Shonen Jump at the time that they were releasing it, but I think in the long run it did not work out well for several reasons including what you described!
There was an announcement in one of the issues of Shounen Jump after they had been running the manga in chronological order in which they said that they would be jumping forward in the publishing in order to more quickly get to the card games and things that people expected from having watched the anime, since the early manga is … Not That, obviously. My recollection is that they wanted you to just go and pick up the full volumes to continue the first portion of the story that had been monthly in the magazine until then, and then they continued what everybody expected YGO to be in Shonen Jump every month as well as publishing it simultaneously as proper books with the prior volumes they’d been releasing in order. I guess they must have thought it would confuse people that you could buy a volume one two and three and also number seven but four through six were not published yet, so they did… what they did.
But in the end they did it so that they could sell the part of the story that they knew was already fanatically popular and just call it number one to not confuse the anime watching audience at the time.
For me, I was primarily reading the manga and seeing three separate ones in a store at any given time made me give up on the whole series entirely for a long while because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I thought I had entered like a Marvel Comics kind of situation and I would never untangle who was from where and when. If they really felt they needed to delineate them like that, I think some kind of subnumbering would have been better, like “Volume 7, Part 1 of the Duelist Saga” or something.
They gave up on these fake subdivisions by the time they put everything in the three in one volumes, though. Even though volumes 3 and 4 of these are extremely expensive and difficult to come by for reasons I have yet to decipher and I’m really mad that my collection is missing them
