Sometimes I feel Crawl is just way to random. Maybe if shops would buy stuff, and there was a town... I dont know, its probably a design goal that makes sense one way or another, but you gotta admit, sometimes you just dont have a chance against the dice.
I agree with half of this.
Yes, it's too random. I'd like to see many of the overpowered monsters in the first few levels either weakened or moved deeper; eg if orc priests did about 1/3 as much damage with their smiting attack, they'd still be a significant threat, especially against low HP characters, but you would at least have some chance of surviving.
There should still be some powerful monsters to teach players the lesson that sometimes it is better to run away than fight (ogres and jellies are a good example,) but at the moment that lesson is rather futile because if you see a monster you want to run away from, there's often no point as it will kill you at range anyway.
I'd also like to see Mephitic Cloud become less of a 'free pass' through the early game; maybe the duration of confusion should be much lower, and being confused should not make monsters suicidal (they should not be jumping into deep water or lava or attacking themselves.) Then there might be a bit more balance between backgrounds with this spell (currently absurdly easy) and those without (currently absurdly hard.)
The matter of shops not buying things is an entirely different matter, and in this case I agree with the developers; if you've ever played Angband or most variants, you will know that the early to mid game is largely spent carrying around useless gear to sell, which can get tedious.
If you want to play a game that has a skill system somewhat similar to Crawl but with an Angband-like town and dungeon, you could try
Sangband