Effectiveness in that the RNG odds are not as bad as they feel. There was a now long dead post awhile back, which actually ran the odds on getting a decent weapon, and they were… reasonable sans a few outliers with too many blessings or ones needing two very specific ones to be good. It actually does not take that long to get a good weapon if you’re actively trying for one in most cases unless you get particularly bad luck. I’m certain the developers who created this system ran the same odds and decided that what we have now is the perfect average balance of time/cost vs. reward.
Unfortunately, we all inevitably have these times of particularly bad luck, and I think its those experiences that we remember, not all the times before when we actually got what we wanted relatively painlessly. Plus, the anxiety of dealing with a system that can produce such results leads pretty much everyone who tries to seriously engage with the system coming away with a negative impression. And for those who engage with it casually, the system itself is obscure, unintuitive, and unengaging enough that they most likely have no interest in participating in it either.
This is what makes the system a failure. It doesn’t matter if it’s “functional” in that in exchange for the intended cost of time and resources you can almost always get what you want from it when the system itself is painful to interact with in the first place. But, it is at least effective at its primary purpose of providing a system to acquire and upgrade equipment.
As an aside, I don’t think the game is dead. FatShark tends to go dead this time of year while their employees mess around and create a brainstorm up a bunch of stuff they think might be interesting, then after a month or two they decide which direction they’d like to take and actually start releasing content. It doesn’t seem like they have a lot of intentional foresight; they work on what they think is interesting at the time.