I definitely have to disagree. Maybe a better randomized loot system would be nice, but completely removing it would kill replayability for me. Part of the fun is waiting to see what kind of loot I'm gonna get from those big chests, and if I know what it's gonna be, it's not fun anymore.
For example, on my current playthrough, I opened a barrel after fighting the lighthouse fight, and found a Beer Mug artifact that never empties. I thought it was really cool to find that there and made that playthrough unique. If that item was always there, it would be cool the first time, but after that I couldn't care less.
I'm fine with some hand-placed stuff, which there already is, and maybe wouldn't mind if they reduced finding so many magical items everywhere. They could maybe sharpen the randomization curve and encourage better items after the boss fights, but removing randomization altogether would be a pretty big mistake I think.
I don't have a huge problem with the loot being random, although I do think more encounters should be peppered with static drops to guarantee that someone's difficult battle doesn't "randomly" end up in utter disappointment. I do wish, however, that containers were not vulnerable to save-scumming and level manipulation.
I also don't personally feels that replayability would suffer if vendor inventories became more static. They can (and probably should) change as a character levels to provide more and more advanced equipment, but their current setup encourages (and rewards) save-scumming as well.
