Loot: effort vs outcome

This is simply you cherry picking examples that suit your narrative.

Run 100 Expedition maps with, and then without logbook drop rate.

Open 100 strongboxes with and without boosting.

All you have to do is look at a well-built temple to prove that increasing rarity etc results in a direct and measurable improvement.

You're just reacting to small sample sizes. If you alced + exalts 100x strongboxes over that sample size you would see results and the same goes for all your other examples.

"The real treasure was the friends(drops) we made along the way."

The sample size is simply too small. You will see the differences if you average out results of 100 juiced maps vs normal maps.

Loot drop is about statistics and probabilities. I agree that there are still a lot of balances to be done between each map mechanics, some definitely feels more rewarding than others, but the cases you mention will always happen no matter what they do, you just need to learn to live with it.

In a way this is a design element they introduced in PoE2 but have only put into one place in maps.

Their goal during the campaign was to catch players having a bad run of luck and bring the minimum level up. Item bases increasing also functionally bring up the minimum power.

They did that by adding specific guaranteed rewards during the campaign.

In maps this mechanic effectively only applies to tablets as completing a map fully has a guaranteed tablet drop somewhere.

During mapping you've almost certainly scaled above the baseline level of loot power and there are no remaining guaranteed improvements so players loot journey becomes more of a macro event across many many maps - Which is where you get your problem, sometimes you just get unlucky streaks where you can't reliably get things you might expect to get in activities that don't have a targeted bonus.

You absolutely do not want to know what is going to drop before you do the encounter. In the expedition example the result would be you skip every encounter that does not have the drops a logbook tag. Cascade this down every system and the efficient way to play would be to not play most of the time.

Yeap, welcome to PoE mate 😁

Slightly different tangent, but i feel catalization omens are the same for me. Wanting cast speed, sure lets me spend to quality then cat. Dont hit what i wanted 90/100 attempts. Yolo, hit 15/100 times. Ggg doesnt care for peoples time. They have admitted they dont. Best you can do is put in max effort always and hope rng blesses you. Or dont do max effort and hope rng blesses you. Rng is rng

You could modify a die to have an extra 6 face and still roll a 1, only to then roll a 6 on a normal die. Would you complain that adding an extra 6 is worthless?

I have not reached the point of running meta juicing strats this Patch, as I was playing Keepers, Lost Ascendants then Phrecia 2.0, but what all that revealed to me is how much worse the loot can get if you overdo it then have to make hasty counter-adjustments under great pressure ... it's more destructive and much harder to resolve long term, especially with seasonal content constantly complicating things further... and it would probably be even harder to deal with in POE 2 due to the wider distribution of player-base diversity...

I've experienced similar results as you in POE2, but didn't reach any solid conclusions as I figured my experience didn't properly represent the full scope of reward possibilities or a big enough sample size.