In response to Tuco's points about goal-driven EXP and static loot:
I think these are both things to look into. Once again, Shadowrun: Dragonfall did a pretty solid with both of these. You get skill points for completing certain tasks and missions, and it's hard to tell if you earned the most talent points you could. I do think bypassing experience and levels in favor of merely improving skills is a great way to design an RPG, but it's far too late to transition D:OS or even a successor to that model of progression, so goal-driven EXP is probably the best bet.
I'm also interested in more unique items with histories and lore. But a problem with static loot is that it hurts replayability if you know exactly what you're going to get. But perhaps you could be guaranteed a unique item from certain bosses, but one from a pool of 5 or 6 possible items. So it's sort of inbetween random and static loot. And there can be totally random loot too, but I completely agree with Tuco that the sheer volume of loot makes it less exciting. I actually want MORE random modifiers on items instead of 50 rings with +1 telekenisis, but maybe a quarter of the current loot overall. So a group of five enemies might drop one or two weapons/armor plus some ingredients, but not like 4 or 5 weapons which can happen now. This would also do much to fix the economy and inventory management at the same time.
