Mostly for the sake of clarifying my own thoughts, I'm going to take a step back and look at what impact hunger currently has, with chunks included, across a general spectrum of character types:
1) You are a mummy. Food is irrelevant.
2) You have an Amulet of the Gourmand. Food is essentially irrelevant. You never need to use rations outside of chunkless branches, and you'll have a bottomless supply of rations by the time you get to them. Only the scummiest of mummy activities are prevented; for most practical purposes you have no food clock.
3) You are a Minotaur Fighter or somesuch. Food is essentially irrelevant. You'll get by on chunks most of the time, eating rations infrequently enough that you're at no risk of running out.
4) You are a Necromancer or corpse-sacrificer who occasionally has to choose between eating a corpse or using it in some other way. Food matters a little bit, but the balance is not tight enough to pose a meaningful restriction. Berserkers also probably fall into this rough category, since berserking isn't really something that's safe or necessary to do all the time.
5) You are a spellcaster with spammable, high-level spells (who may or may not worship Sif Muna) and no Gourmand. You can very easily go from the bottom of Satiated to Near Starving in the course of a battle or two. Chunk availability is streaky, and you will eat rations often. So often that the rate at which you are willing to go through rations can be a meaningful strategic factor governing how you choose to cast. Just the other day I had an OOD-casting HEAE of Vehument who was on Lair 3 with around five full-sized rations to her name who had some thinking to do (until she died in a Spellforged Servent-related OOD accident). Most of my characters have like 20+ rations by this point.
6) You are a Vampire, Ghoul, or Troll. Hunger is a minor factor most of the time, but you're suddenly given the middle finger when you try to do anything in the extended endgame.
7) You worship Elyvilon and are encouraged to spend hunger denying yourself chunks. You're faced with a tradeoff between piety gain and ration loss which is far more strict than a typical corpse-sacrificer's.
8) You are a Spriggan and are paranoid about hunger costs all the time.
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I would go so far as to say that nutrition, as a mechanic, is only interesting in cases 5, 7, and 8. Of those three cases, the only one where the particulars of chunk mechanics is relevant is case 5. The racial diets lumped under 6 are significant, but the only times they REALLY matter (chunkless branches) feel binary, arbitrary, and kind of unfair. And also largely irrelevant in a 3-rune game.
Taking a quote from the chunkless commit log:
Give monsters a chance to drop meat perma-food on death
A 1/4 chance to drop beef jerky or meat ration on death, strongly
weighted towards jerky, if the monster has normal intelligence or
higher, leaves a corpse, and the player isn't worshiping gozag.
This gives an average drop of 550 nutrition per monster able to
generate the food. It's a bit harder to estimate the average nutrition
previously received from chunks given the number of variables, but
assuming monsters drop 2 chunks on average, and assuming a nutrition
weighted toward contaminated chunks at 625 per chunk (3:1 contaminated
vs. not-contaminated), monsters drop 625 nutrition on average through
their corpse with a 50% corpse drop rate. This is probably an
underestimate of that average, but we certainly aren't dropping more
nutrition this way compared to what we did through chunks.
If those estimations are accurate, then chunkless is currently simulating players with Gourmand (the vast majority of potential monster nutrition is successfully ingested) much more closely than it's simulating players who don't (the vast majority of potential nutrition rots before it can be put to use). That means case 5 collapses into case 2 and nutrition as a mechanic becomes virtually irrelevant outside of a few race- and god-specific edge cases.
At some point you have to stop and ask what the hunger mechanic is actually
for. Is it only a failsafe against the hyper-scummy grinding behavior that Mummies are prone to indulging in sometimes? Or are the strategic considerations of case 5 above considered integral?