billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Having run a lot of 3e/PF and a fair amount of 4e I had a lot of experience with crafting and players picking their own magic items. With every magic item being chosen by exhaustively searching the rules and either purchased at a magic store, made to order, or crafted by a PC. Especially in 4e/PF, every minute of downtime was spent crafting artisanal magic items specifically for each character.
Which was boring AF and made magic just item-based-feats.
I purposely shifted away from that with 5e and gave out magic items randomly. I let the item define the character, with players getting and falling in love with some random item that they never knew they wanted. Like the swashbuckler who randomly got slippers of spiderclimb and suddenly happily realized they were Nightcrawler or the rogue who got a ring of telekenesis.
I'm going to quote this because the full control of magic items as budgeted power-ups in 3e was probably the most significantly transformative change to the way D&D was played in the wild. In previous editions, people wanted certain goodies like rings/cloaks of protection, better AC, magic weapons, girdles of strength/glove of dexterity, etc. But with random or at least non-PC oriented hoards of treasure, pursuing the strategy of getting those items was difficult to achieve. People made do with things like rings of shooting stars. Once the magic item economy got into full swing in 3e, that ring was just fodder for cash and the Big 6 items. And that kind of sucked. I'm glad 5e has moved well away from that.
But like GlassJaw said, it's worth tailoring things occasionally with certain signature items. You can do that and still have players make do with the other thing they get and discovering things they might not have otherwise thought up.