At first, crafting system was the players' ability to have a second chance at getting what they wanted, compared to its current state, items were much cheaper to craft, requiring less and more common resources.
Then the crafting has been nerfed by increased crafting costs as well as reduced material gain from deconstructed item, this was somewhat compensated by increased droprate of HE items, CM missions also rewarded 5 HE items per run, making it a somewhat viable alternative to pre-patch crafting as the sheer amount of received items guaranteed either some upgrade or quite a few materials to have another try with crafting.
This has been rather quickly corrected and challenge mode now results in only 2 HE items (and some materials) that usually are considered "junk" due to the fact their newly introduced Gear Score is hardly ever inflated enough to compete with GS200+, which BPs are available in the Dark Zone.
This creates an issue where HE drop are both quite rare to stumble upon in PvE and the Dark Zone usually results in rewards that can simply be described as "disappointing", despite usually generating quite a bit of crafting materials in the process (further increasing the value of crafting).
While polishing random DZ drops to perfection is going to take quite a while, I'm suggesting a somewhat simpler solution for the case of Challenge Mode, which gives the choice back to the player. Namely, allow the player to pick the reward they want from the pool of available items generated at the end of the mission. This doesn't exactly resolve all the issues, but at least gives the player a sense of agency instead of being forced to deal with bad RNG, instead, rewards will be nearly equally dictated by both RNG and the player.
Eventually though, this is going to cause players' mindset to shift from picking "the best" reward to picking "the least bad" one, that still gets them just a tiny bit closer to their goal due to the ability to pick what crafting materials they receive from consecutive runs.
The choice of rewards mechanic could be further developed to allow the player to roll a new reward at the cost of removing e.g 2 rewards from the current pool.
To provide an visual example:
At the end of the mission, player would be presented with a choice to pick 1 out of N rewards (for the sake of the example, N is equal to 5)
The player can pick a reward they deem worthy of their effort or try and roll an item they don't want and a second randomly chosen one hoping for a reward that better suits their need (can be repeated until there's only a single reward left).
What do you think?
Some challenge missions w/the wear ppl are getting better geared and figuring out more strategies can already speed run through Lincoln Tunnel & Lexington event center...to be able to narrow down the rewards by multiple choice will ultimately conflict w/what Massive is trying to do w/slowing down the gearing of players as seen in crafting.
While I like the idea as it benefits me as well, what will likely end up happening is players will always choose the set gear item because it breaks down into more crafting materials or choose the item that breaks down into the material they need more (i.e. gun parts and electronics).
I also think if they implemented this system it would be bugged and players would be able to figure out how to infinitely re choose rewards until it rolls the most godly piece of gear and/or multiple drops.
tl;dr - in the current state of the game systems like this will probably do more harm than good.
I've never said that the gear set item is guaranteed, I've simply used that colour to emphasize on the fact of exchanging 2 "lesser" items into a new one that may or may not be greater.
At any rate, that's still 5 random rewards and it's just like picking one out of 5 runs instead of keeping all 5 from 5 runs like we have now. I don't think it's any more than a timesaver and the amount of possible re-rolls of the reward can be easily limited if the need arises.