The Game Often Feels Like it is Punishing Us

[Valence]

I do agree with that aetherwell alliance roulette problem. That the base duty would give proportionally less aetherwell only makes sense, else people would just farm this one above all the other ones. However, for the daily roulette where you cannot choose what you get, getting CT is punishment because the daily aetherwell bonus also scales accordingly to the duty's length, which is bad. While the base duty aetherwell reward should adjust to the duty's length, no qualm about that, making the daily bonus also do is a crummy move that just feels bad.

On RNG, and I'm saying this as a huge fan of RNG systems (may be a deformation from my TTRPG enjoyment), RNG will feel good when you get rewarded for making the most of it and using it well as a player. It will however feel very bad when getting a certain % of rng successes becomes required to complete something, which is the problem in your CE examples: the player will feel bad because even though they made all the correct choices, the rng didn't net them enough successes to pass the minimum threshold for victory. In short, what I'd call positive RNG is RNG that generates choices rewarding the player with an added bonus or generating positive feedback loops, and negative RNG is just gamba RNG.

For instance with your MNR/BTN example, it's so barebones that it's as you said, it's gamba. When it comes to expert recipes it's a little better because the system is designed to generate choices that allow you to surpass what a normal recipe would allow with normal progress/quality if you play it smart with what you get, but the problem is still that the final threshold to get gold with notably the EX+ variants is too high and therefore results in you NEEDING to get a certain amount of good, meta RNG on specific moves to reach the mark, which is essentially again, gamba. To make it better they'd need to redesign their thresholds (and some of their material expert states and what they give when used right) so that they're higher than what you could get with a normal recipe, but not so that they're so high that even doing the right choices with the rng you get still makes you unable to reach the mark.