The combination of needing items to craft along with establishing recipes as we move along should prevent tinker syndrome.
I don't think this quite addresses the issue with Tinker. Yes, scarcity would help some, if only because we can only tinker at a tenth the rate due to needing to find stuff, but open recipes are
exactly why Tinker created OP items. Tinker created OP stuff because you'd give us some material or items and state that they have certain abilities, but then have those abilities be poorly engineered or utilized. The PSL, for instance, was a really stupid weapon from an engineering perspective, and was only balanced because it had significant engineering flaws. Forcefields were rather clearly intended exclusively for being armor, and were balanced in that role, but not at all when we started getting creative with them. Tesla sabers were a stupid rule-of-cool design which were greatly improved by being stuck on a laser, but were
balanced for the stupid design, and therefore not the bayonet design.
Another issue which could easily come to the fore in this system is
stupid questions. For instance, asking how well a gun works against an armor that it's terrible against, or how well a deliberately flawed design works. This tends to result in the stuff from the first paragraph--balanced items which have engineering flaws as a key part of their balance. Fix the flaw, and suddenly you have an OP weapon. Generally this has been accidental in the past, but it's easy to do intentionally, and
will result in OP stuff.
You're not gonna prevent tinker with nothing more than an open crafting system. Slow it, sure. But to stop it? You need something more, be it harsher retroactive balancing, more competent people, or just not having an open system to begin with.
...Oh, and making a list of a thousand random parts is stupid. "Cathode Ray Tube" type stuff is just gonna be worthless bloat the vast majority of the time. If you're gonna collect a parts list, collect of general "component types" list. Like the big spoiler I posted before? It should boil down to two or three different categories of item. When things are being added to the inventory, you can be more specific, and maybe limit their use in crafting recipes more, but it would be much better to roll for what type of item is found, rather than the specific form that item takes.