Let’s look at your example of “buy a pack of random cards”. I think is a good illustration of the tradeoffs involved.
Let’s say we hard-code that feature. SoG wants to sell 6 cards for a fixed price, say 30 XCP. But then Force of Will wants to sell 8 cards for 50 XCP, or 10 cards for 60 XCP with a 10% chance of getting 20 cards. Then another game wants to add a “stretch goal” to a card pack promotion. If 100 people buy 5 cards for 10 XCP, then everyone gets a bonus 5 cards.
You could hard code enough features to make all of these things possible. Then in the next 6 months, another use case gets hard-coded in. Soon the Counterparty code base becomes so bloated with so many features that it becomes unmaintainable and insecure. That is not a sustainable path.
There is a lot of development effort going into the EVM right now. We need to wait for it to stabilize. When (if?) that happens, then we should merge it into Counterparty. In the long term, Counterparty will be better in the long run. But it is going to take some time - probably longer than any of us want.
We need to have patience. And we’re going to need more developer help either way…