In Divine Divinity, they could set default levels for items that were preplaced (eg. Dragon Armour is always level 5 out of 5.). It was when items were generated by merchants or corpses that randomness became a problem. There was a chance that any random item could be more powerful than the Dragon Armour or the Nobleman's Sword/Dagger/Amulet. And if you sat there and reloaded enough, you could get it from the first orc in the game!
Another problem was that the stats for items like the Dragon Armour and Nobleman's Thing were too wildly random. The only time I used the reload cheat was on the Larian Armour. My first one had an armour of 210. My second had an armour of 410. The other stats weren't too different. I had found random drops of Chain Mail that were better than that first Larian Armour.
We want quest rewards to be worth it!