Yes, there's a lot in the ancestral "spaghetti code" that modern Devs don't understand. And, when I say "Modern", I mean any dev from after LBR.
For example, When Mondain's Legacy was announced, It was announced that Elves would get 20% more colored ore than humans, and that the rates for humans and elves were supposedly a flat 40% and 60% respectively.
However, anyone that was a veteran miner could tell you that every resource square had ITS OWN COLOR CHANCE PERCENTAGE, that was definitely NOT 40% base.
Some spots give maybe 10% or less colored - day in, day out, regardless of the colored ore type present (including if you used the BOD reward tools to elevate it when it was in an "iron only" state to DC or Shadow)
Other spots, often in mines, dungeons and other dangerous locations in the AoS and earlier facets, routinely give 60%. 70%, 80%, possibly higher, under the same conditions! And still do. Most miners who realized this, once the spots started randomizing, changed their rune books to go to these sites.
And, instead of being additive, the "Elf Bonus" appeared to only apply to the number of digs, and as a MULTIPLIER to the Elf chance (not an additive bonus). So, one of those miserable 10% spots was only 12% for an Elf (no appreciable difference), while a spot that averaged 70% colored for a human was averaging about 84% for an elf.
So, there was a whole system mis-described, but of course, if you do their sort of testing (hundreds of random digs on multiple sites), you probably would average 40% colored, so that is what it would seem to them. But, miners keep records, and do their equivalent of "claim staking" by recording what works best. Only "strip miners" would ignore the proven hot spots for just covering an area.
And, don't forget it took them 6+ years to figure out that a missing ")" in one line of code, that they'd examined dozens of times, was what was screwing up Smith LBOD ratios, prior to KR.
Food doesn't have a provable effect for most things - but there's no guarantee that there's not something buried deep in there that can rarely affect something - even if it is just forcing a reseed on the flaky, streaky, RNG.
