I referred to the problem of finding essential items. Random loot boxes will increase the RNG-factor even further, but currently those items also drop in these boxes.
So currently i could at least look up what type of box has a high drop chance for the wanted item and then loot POIs that have lots of these box-types. But if even the boxes in a poi are randomized, i can't even look for POIs that provide a better chance.
Or did i get the idea of random boxes wrong? Just placing them random, but still predefined amounts and types? Well, that would remove the "loot room". But then... just don't create POIs with a centralized loot room, but spread the boxes over the POI. If they are spread, there is no single point you can quickly go to. Either you only get few boxes, or you need to go through the whole POI if you want to grab them all.
Containers should definitely be pre-defined if POIs are meant to have unique loot lists (which they should imo and already do to an extend). I am referring to the locations (or the important containers spawn chance) in dungeon-POIs - the "loot rooms" as you correctly said and some decentralization so that the POI experience gets differentiated a bit.
But at any case a alternative source like a perk, trader, or something that can be "controlled by the player" can guarantee that you will always get something, if it is essential. TFP overdid it imo, in that regard, compared to the time when all recipes were just random. They went to the other extreme and introduced an alternative for almost everything. Then implemented books to somewhat make up for it, after realizing the value of the expectation in random loot.
Still not mentioned that POIs then need boxvolumes that say where a box may spawn. Just like the sleeper volumes. Imho a real random box placment would require a very good algorithm for placing them. I don't think that will work, especially not without high performance overhead.
Well depends how they want to approach it. This is one of those problems (if, again, you consider it a problem), which has a huge number of solutions, depends on how they already have built their stuff, their profiler bottlenecks and only someone like faatal is really qualified to explore.
I am sure that there will definitely be a price to pay on performance/loading times, whether one runs something like this at runtime, generation, changes the prefab asset or an instance of it, or has prepared various prefab instances beforehand and has to load all of them like
@Solomon said etc.
But do container locations need to be completely randomized in the POI space, nearby block checking and all, sacrificing that cinematic experience of the admittedly great POI design? I don't think so. As long as the solution achieves the specific purpose of making a POI looting experience rather random and unpredictable, since containers are plentiful, it can be something as simple as to assign the "this is a phat lootbox" variable to whatever container within the house, tweak its spawn-chance in the first place etc, so that, for example, instead the e.g. 1 or 1-2 per POI becomes 0-3. My point is, as far as I am concerned, any solution that makes it look random to players, *is* random.
In earlier versions POIs didn't have a loot room. That came with the trader quest and almost every POI had been "dungeonized" since then. And i guess the lootroom should be a motivation to clear a POI till the "end". The dungeonization is required because a clear quest in a huge POI would be really pita if there is no path you can follow, but have to search the whole building "manually". But still not a reason why there has to be a loot room at the end.
Oh don't get me started with the... quests, let's not get into them. But yes - it's a similar logic (also reminds me of some game's "radiant" endless quests). Never liked dungeon-ization for that very reason. Dungeon-POIs are beautifully designed and if this was an open world game they would be stellar. I would too want players to experience a dungeon-POI's cinematic experience by carefully encouraging the player's chosen path. But in a randomly generated sandbox, where those POIs are pasted multiple times, their novelty wears off very quickly -- in a single playthrough even, and it doesn't make any sense to want players to repeat the same "canned" experience random N times.
Say you want to create a tiled floor, but its pieces will be placed randomly. But you can only get your tiles from, either a stack with a combination of tiles that resemble a beautiful picture, or a stack with generically painted tiles and random shapes.
And yes, alternative sources for required items and random boxes don't exclude each other. But if the solution is to have no loot room, just don't design loot rooms. No need for random boxes. It's not searching a solution for a problem. It's a random solution looking for a fitting problem.
Even if, again, POI designers did an excellent job, the loot rooms belong in the Elder Scrolls etc, not a randomly generated world with many identical mostly-randomly pasted POIs. But they obviously are not going away now and it would be a terrible waste if they did. Loot rooms still make sense, even if they don't contain the majority/best of the loot in the POI. So at this current situation, a solution has to be found for the problem that was created, which again, *disclaimer*, may not be seen as a problem for others.
Tbh I'd prefer if the recipes were gained in a Subnautica-style way, even if it isn't exactly meant for a sandbox. 
