Randomizing Research Value

[VileFault]

Hello, all. So, R&D has been striking a number of people as pretty boring and repetitive these days. You can ostensibly "invent" anything by following a pre-calculated set of steps. I don't know about you, but I think invention should require at least a smidgen of creativity, or at the very least trial and error. To this end, they could also make the research value fluctuate a bit between rounds.

For example, a Subspace Receiver Circuit Board, a common component used to advance research levels midway through the process, has an Engineering (E) 3, Bluespace (B) 2, and Data Theory (DT) 4. Consider if these values were only necessarily within plus or minus one of their current values. Some rounds, you would be pleasantly surprised to find it with a B level of 3, allowing you to bypass some steps. In others, however, it would only yield B level 1, making is mostly useless for the purposes of research. In the latter case, you would have to break from routine and find another item to check. Maybe this would be the Subspace Broadcaster CB, which requires another engineering level. Maybe that would require you to update engineering level before continuing, and thus change your routine up further. In a few rounds, you might not be able to access certain more complex things, or it might require very rare materials. The way I see it, not necessarily being able to mass produce gatling lasers and bags of holding every round would make people appreciate their rarity a bit more. Also, if something has a default research value of 0 in a given aspect, it shouldn't suddenly gain value in that department. By the same token, items should never get a research value that they didn't possess before. A screwdriver giving Data Theory research is just silly.

A few points of clarification might be necessary here. Firstly, I want the research values to differ between /rounds/ not individual /objects/. That is, making an item repeatedly in one round won't change its worth. That would be silly.

Secondly, if this ever was implemented I would really appreciate it if there was an easier way to reclaim materials from research items as well. Couldn't the protolathe just use its already extant recipes, maybe with an 80% reclamation efficiency, to break down unused items? The reason I bring this up now is that, without this, I fear that R&D may become a disorganized heap of things people thought they might need, but that ended up being worthless.

Thanks for your time, and if you made it this far, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

P.S. Some of the things the dev team is already working seem directed towards this problem (modular gun parts, for example), and this looks to me like a decently effective mechanic that would be relatively simple to implement while they are at it.

[Guest Complete Garbage]

Is there any way to do this while making sure everything is still possible to research? I'm fine with changing functionality, but against limiting it. Another(unrelated) thing: Perhaps have objects slightly vary in material cost between rounds.