Thank you Goldhawk for not showing too much too early!

I think maybe there would be a heck of a lot of time/effort/cash spent on things that wouldn't turn up in every game. That's possibly the killer. It's not terribly tough to come up with alternate tech trees/weapons/craft tweaks/ bonuses to make all the research viable within the game, and not just bolted on for the sake of it.

I didn't think he was talking generated stats. I thought he was talking about fixed stats but

This would be confusing when trying to research the alien artefacts and possibly a little frustrating.

What Gorlom said. It's not confusing if you name it as "Alien Weapon Artefact". It wouldn't help with any problem, just make the game more random (and harder) with regards to weapon research (i.e. you don't know what you are getting until it's researched whereas if you manage to recover a heavy plasma, you know once it's researched that you are getting the most powerful weapon and don't need to bother researching the rest).

The heavy plasma would down any alien (upto 3 hits Vs Muton though) despite the fact there was some attempt in the original to have different weapon types be paticularly effective against different aliens - for example, the Reaper was supposed to be more vulnerable to incendiery fire than AP.

I always found that HE/incendiery shells would kill a Reaper slowly (no good) where as a heavy plasma kills it stone dead.