Well, that's actually part of what made me think of this. The prospect of randomness is not inherently bad, and can make for some really fun stuff IF you do it right.
Look at looter/shooters, for example. The entire progress of a character can be changed or defined by what rare gun you find early on. This gives what could be a relatively ordinary experience great replayability, because one time you might find, say, a rare shotgun, so you tend to get up close and focus on things like speed and durability, while on another run you might find a rare sniper rifle and so you focus on stuff like range and crits and max single-shot damage.
By offering some degree of randomness here, you can create gentle incentives for players to play in different ways based on what they find!
But it IS important to limit this somewhat, which is why I think we should retain the basic engineering and mostly add the tinkering/experimentals on top of that.
