My take on loot is that no game has ever got it quite right but some have got a a lot closer than others. I think there are three laws about loot and the related subject of crafting (since crafting directly affects loot in a game):
1. Crafting is a zero sum game. Either you can craft better equipment than you can loot or buy or you can't. If you can, crafting is the only game in town and loot is all but irrelevant except for money to buy consumables, if you can't crafting is a waste of time and looting and shopping, especially specific items, is all that matters. Balance is impossible because if crafted vs. looting were equal you would always choose crafting since that way you can make exactly the items you want but you may not be able to buy/find them.
2. It is impossible in this day and age for many people to resist Googling "[MyGame] best weapon" etc. It is almost impossible for the remainder to avoid coming across spoilers for these as people inevitably discuss them interminably round the boards.
3. In every game either you can buy anything you want but have a restricted supply of money or you can make effectively unlimited amounts of money but there is a restricted supply of quality items.
No game I've played has IMO ever managed to navigate this minefield and many have made howling errors in addressing it. Some of my favorite examples:
Skyrim: crafting is everything. Loot, even the supposedly legendary deidric artifacts and weapons, are pathetic by comparison to what you can craft for yourself, utterly useless. Quest rewards, whether gold or items, are therefore irrelevant or more accurately non-existent.
Wasteland 2: If you choose to use energy weapons there is only one in the game worth anything, the Gamma Ray Blaster. If you do not locate this weapon (and it is pretty hardy to find and secure blind) your energy weapon character is massively gimped and there is nothing you can do about it. Epic fail.
NWN2: Theoretically you can craft all the best gear, and the game goes to much trouble to encourage you to do so. But in practice the crafting system was nerfed to stop you doing it by making key ingredients extremely rare and the skill/feat/level combination requirements Byzantine complicated and difficult to achieve. Ragequit inducing misdirection.
Other games have got it nearly right IMO:
DAO: Everything you might want is available at selected merchants, but the quality items are so expensive and gold so hard to accumulate that you cannot afford to equip your party with everything you would like to - you have to make hard choices. Except you don't because they also put in the Lyrium Potion scam enabling you to mint unlimited gold and buy everything at the cost of a little traveling and mouse-clicking. Why did they ruin it with that?
BG/IWD/PST (the IE games): Essentially like DAO except no "Lyrium Potion Scam" exploit and much better genuinely unique found items and quest rewards. IMO the best looting/shopping system except for one flaw. If you don't know what you're going to find you can waste too much gold on unnecessary items and you can skill up in the wrong weapons type irreversibly. It also suffers from the "[MyGame] best weapon" thread problem of course.
My view is that nobody has ever got this completely right and in the grand scheme of things DOS doesn't do that bad a job of things, subject to some irritations. But then every RPG has irritations of one sort or another. Most people get pretty irritated looking at their monthly payslips too.
