Random loot like in Diablo will be something to grind for. The very best becomes the baseline, and the rest gets tossed like garbage. Random loot in Diablo was mostly garbage no one wanted to trade for.
Diablo (and most of its successors) are intrinsically flawed though:
Massive supply + negligible attrition -> rampant deflation.
The former wouldn't be an issue for Starsector, and the latter can be designed around. (item durability, with limited or diminishing returns on repairs)
Diablo-esque loot has been suggested before, and I think it'd be a great addition to Starsector; making the loot from battles more interesting & rewarding, and giving some dynamism to fleet loadouts. (rather than the inevitable plateau the game currently suffers from)
There'd definitely be some UI management issues though, as outfitting a single player character with a dozen or so items is a lot less work than outfitting a fleet in SS.
The natural counter to that is to make them rarer, but that too has a problem; when presented with a rare finite resource, Humans will naturally hoard.
So, make them time limited? Solves both problems, but.....
How do you weave a rational justification as to why a weapon you salvage from a fallen foe will become unusable after X days, whether or not you make use of it?
SPAZ's unique loot (Specialists) was a good way of doing it, so maybe SS's Officers will fulfil the interest & dynamism that loot brings. (Officers can definitely be more rationally explained as being time limited than weapons can be, and they would, by their very nature, be less numerous)