Well, certainly it's all that stuff is tedious *now* but I remember being rather satisfied with myself when I finally figured out how to train spellcasting as a fighter, or managed to find a knife for the first time on a character who both didn't start with one, or managed to finally rid myself of a hunger ring, or a teleport ring (Back when I didn't know how to mitigate the effects, and everything was new)
Now those things stop being challenges after the first few times you do them, and become pretty boring and tedious pretty quickly given how many games you have to play of crawl before you get proficient enough at the 'meat' of the game. Which is why those sorts of things aren't challenging after a while, they lack the serious replay value that crawl players require.
Before I knew it was even *called* victory dancing, and I had never logged into a forum or looked at a spoiler or had any idea how to train most skills without starting with them, figuring that stuff out was fun, and admittedly only once, and also admittedly, not for all situations. Once I'd figured out the puzzle of how to get my experience to go where I wanted it to, doing it over and over and over again was tedious.
Right now this gap is filled with strategic decisions- when to use enchant scrolls, what equipment to use, whether to save up for that treasure trove, etc. I think the major problem is that any choice like this needs a certain amount of "minimum complexity" to start being fun, and the easiest way to do that is to tie it to the combat system (As the aforementioned strategic choices do.)
The "strategic" challenge has always been there, and it hasn't changed substantially, and it's a good solid mechanism and doesn't need to, but having only one dimension (combat) makes this and any game feel flat and uninteresting. It's why in RPGs there's side-quests and mini-games and why you can craft and collect sets or solve puzzles, because game designers have known for a long time, that having a solid combat-only game makes for a less fun game.
I'm not saying Nausea or Victory dancing should come back, only that I'd love to see *something* take their place. Problems to solve that do *not* directly advance you towards the game's main goal of killing monsters and gaining runes then exiting with the orb.
Now on a more positive note, how about this suggestion for curses:
Possibility #1:
Curses have an overlay effect which has a powerful drawback
The "just plain bad" items which show up now would be removed, but their effects would be part of the curses themselves, and manifest after using the cursed item for a while.
Some examples of curse drawbacks:
Haunting, Rotting, random teleport, Marking (alarm trap style), inverting the +'s on an item to -'s temporarily, hunger (Rather than the current 'over time' this would be an immediate loss of a significant chunk of nutrition on curse activation), stasis, mutation, binding (sticking to you like current curses do), forced rage
The idea being that the curse would manifest itself some time randomly after you start using the item, and (depending on the type of curse) not forever. You wouldn't automatically know what kind of curse it was (unless you worshipped ash) when wearing it. The randomized timing on the effects would cause bad things to happen when you weren't always in a position to go fix it (i.e. in the middle of combat)
Remove curse could be downgraded to suppress the bad effects of a cursed item for a while, more of a 'suppress curse' but cursed items would be fundamenetally cursed forever. (I would also make this an Ash power, so praying over scrolls wouldn't be giving up a long-term useful resource)
Curses would also have benefits (whose effects would also be suppressed by suppress curse scrolls) typically although not always evil-ish which would be *added* to the base item, making in effect a mini-artifact (cursed artifacts themselves wouldn't let you know which property was associated with the curse, you'd have to figure it out by suppressing it
pretty much anything but holy weapon or rN
Some examples:
Vampirism (regeneration for jewellery/armour), +Rage, +Invis, +venom (rPois for armour/jewellery), +sInv, resistances, etc. etc.