I used to play this modpack extensively a year or two ago. Back then, I could look at a chickens stats while sat inside a nesting pen from Hatchery. However, now I have to pull the chicken out if I want to get a look at its stats.

This is very cumbersome when dealing with 200+ chickens at a time. The extra overhead in time spent loading / unloading chickens from pens detracts a lot from the experience of playing the mod.

Is this by design, or is it concidered a bug?

I need more information like mod versions, is this a modpack? Its not by design with this. are you using the egganalyzer or are you talking about HWYLA/TOP?

chickens-6.1.0
Hwyla-1.8.26-B41_1.12.2
hatchery-1.12.2-2.2.2
morechickens-1.12.2-3.2.0

I'm so relieved to hear this is not intended behaviour. Anything you need for reproducing this, just lemme know. I'm not using the analyzer, I used to be able to just look at the nesting pen and I'd know.

Is this something you think is solveable by fiddling with config? I haven't been able to see how so far.

currently not sure whats causing it.. you could try one probe for now. I haven't had time to look at this. but I know some stuff I was using back when was depreciated. so maybe it was removed. who knows.