I agree. I ended up just committing after refluxing a couple of ideas, but it seemed more interesting in theory than in practice. The original spec had a few different "abilities" to unlock (beyond just the hook) like swapping positions and temporarily increasing the temperature, which might have walked the line between "out of control" and actual influence over the outcome.
If you _really_ practice, you can start to delude yourself into thinking you're making your own luck - but it's mainly RNG (in a chaotic system).