I agree, but the way the game is set up makes loot more important. Your capacity to function at every level of gameplay, be it dialogue or combat, is influenced by loot to varying degrees. Loot increases charisma, crafting, damage output, damage intake, spell functionality, health, mobility, and so on. The game was designed to be challenging, and because your characters' combat functionality is heavily influenced by equipment, the game expects you to put more focus on loot than you might otherwise like to.
Loot is a tool, not the focus. Tactical play is the focus. I cans strip off all of my gear and still win a battle without my gear by using sound tactics to a given situation (which reminds me, I need to do a long play naked sometime to make my point). There is no such thing as gear checks in this game. Again, you are arguing the concept of an MMORPG whether you are meaning to or not.
What I'm advocating for is a system that minimizes the amount of time you spend focusing on loot and thereby increases the time you spend on core aspects of the game. This can be done in a variety of ways, including hybrid systems that simultaneously appeal to gamers who want more dice in their rolls while addressing the game's demand to have good, up-to-level equipment.
loot is not the focus of the game, but it is a component of character development. I think you put far too much weight on it being responsible for successful play. If this were a 100% skill based game where the skills were directly connected to gear acquisition, you might have an argument. The system however is not designed that way. Gear can make things easier, but gear is not required to be good in order to succeed. I have been playing on hard and none of the fights do I find gear being the reason I win. My friend and I took out some of the level 6 orcs when we just got to town, still level 2, and before we picked up any gear. Gear helps a lot if you get some nice things, but it is not the focus.
There absolutely is a middle ground. Tailored loot can coexist with a degree of randomness. In fact, it already does; enemies tend to drop items in their level category. The game also has a hybrid of static loot and random drops, albeit with a strong lean to the latter. Absolutist thinking only leads to dogmatism. These are spectrums, and in some cases it only takes a slight lean in order to appease a player base.
Um... that is one side getting its way. You just described tailored loot. Tailored loot is not random, it is tailored loot. If you have "tailored loot with a degree of randomness", then you have provided me tailored loot, not random loot.
The trend in table tops, as far as I've observed, is to use game play and design as a template rather than hard and fast rules. But given that both of us only have our own experience with GMs and there's hardly a census or a study on how they typically handle loot systems, I agree that this isn't a productive area of discussion and may as well be dropped.
D&D started with the fast and loose concept. Gygax then created AD&D which was a specific rule system of play. If you are playing PnP making up everything as you go, well... that is fine, but it isn't a sound argument against the point I was making.
You don't want to get me started on the PnP systems of today. I find them as lazy and disorganized as I do mainstream gaming. I am not saying they should not exist, but I find them to be so subjective as it concerns this discussion to be useless to any logical or practical means.
