I bet it's surprisingly simple, it's extremely hard to mimic "real" randomness and MA don't have the coders for it.
It sounds logical that the algorithm would be pretty standard and it's the prerequisites and seed that are the unknowns on how loot works and also probably the pool.
my guess is that:
first: GLOBAL loot is distributed first planetwise(either randomly or calculated on player population/activity)
second: loot is distributed according to a few rules and then randomly in each mob category e.g:
drones cannot drop oils, has 30% chance of dropping "robot_shit", currently has a low hunting activity and is allocated 3% of all "some_robot_loot" on caly.
We've pretty much already proved that there is an update frequency(was it every 4 hours?) so when that happens the game checks the pool and assigns loot distributions anew.
The algorithm probably checks for activity when assigning to allow more loot in mobs being heavily hunted but might also be a very simple one as it's not uncommon to see streaks in low activity mobs for longer durations, which means that it's not "that" random or the seed isn't.
I always found myself with less returns during days where you saw many cratfing globals, this could be explained by the fact that loot pool is smaller when crafters have hoarded big parts of it to do large runs
third: if you're lucky and are hunting on a planet with much loot on mobs with much loot then your chances are much bigger of success but something must be seeding the algorithm for the actual value per kill.
This might be a seed stored in your avatar(could be the origin of "the personal loot pool) or other variables such as location, dps, eco....impossible to tell but if you were smart enough and gathered enough relevant info you could probably almost crack the system.
....BUT that would probably require a bigger playerbase....as there are many more hunters on caly so you couldn't gather enough data to estimate how much each planet got from the pool by watching globals...also some planets have alot of high hp mobs which gives more globals so you'd have to check the loot value of each hunter on each planet and all planets would have to have active hunters on a majority of all mobs ...then you would find God...lootius be praised
