f you want to include Minor items then they slot in without a problem. I found they suffered from the crime of being uninteresting, so I took them out, and if I wanted enemies to have slightly higher stats I just gave them higher stats. If anything removing minor items and just bumping enemy stats a few points takes away things to worry about - you don't have to recalculate everything when someone casts a Dispel, and the players don't have to sift through junk items to get something they might want to use.
It gets old when players start passing knowledge checks and see mooks with bigger numbers than they realistically should have. Besides, it does better represent various enemy tiers like like a band of orc thugs armed with clubs and a guild of assassins who all run around with enchanted daggers and boots of + stealth.
And I do agree that minor items are not interesting otherwise. If anything, my preferred solution would be making minor items a thing that you can mass produce so that you can equip a band of your henchmen without wasting much of your own time. Basically the cost stays the same but the crafting time is much faster than for lesser items (also coming online sooner).
Basically because Wish. Wish allows you to create any minor item, so if you can have your item in any form, why not always have rings? Rings have an advantage over almost every other item type - they don't take a hand to use, you can easily wear 8, they are unobtrusive and are hard to steal, they fit in your pocket and you can easily swap between them. So the default becomes every item is a ring and there are no more magic hats, or bracers, or boots, or pendants.
I think you are overlooking the fact that most players do not play characters who have the aesthetic that permits them to wear 8 rings. In fact, the only time I made a character that ran around with 8 rings was when I was allowed to use Koumei's
Reaping Mauler remake. It should be pretty obvious why.
But more in the realm of mechanics, a CL limitation of 2 already makes non-standard items more rare in the world, making them harder to find. You did say that the system is meant to be random with wish and crafting being the only reliable way of getting exactly what you want. Considering that the actual number of characters being able to use wish is not all that big and the fact that you can only wish for lesser items when you only care about moderate ones I do not think that non-standard lesser items would be that common in the world that you can get it in any item shop.
Which actually brings up another issue. How do people trade or commission items under these rules? Considering that you can only make a limited number of lesser items before you get to use wish at which point you no longer care about lesser magic items and even selling those items is pointless because the people who would even want them can give you nothing in return.
Here is what I like to think, and this is purely my own additions to better flesh out the setting that it governed by these rules.
I would say that the only people who would have an abundance of lesser magic items are organizations benefiting from the benediction of someone powerful. The aforementioned assassins guild for instance could have a powerful rogue behind it or the city guard is led by a high level paladin. Under such conditions lesser magic items would still be heavily regulated as such organizations would likely mark their equipment so you can't simply use it unless you are part of that organization. Of course wars and raids still happen, and people do die and stuff does get lost so independent traders still get some of the lesser magic junk in their shops from time to time.
Moderate items would fill two roles in trading, barter for other moderate stuff you want and barter for planar currency so you can make moderate or greater stuff that you want. Greater magic items would obviously never be traded directly under these rules.
Other than that here are a few other things I want to see:
* Positive Energy gems can be dissolved to give +1 inherent bonus to charisma and relieves fatigue/exhaustion by one step for living creatures. Dealing 3d6 positive energy damage to undead.
* Negative Energy gems can be dissolved to give +1 inherent bonus to intelligence and causes exhaustion when drank by a living creature. Undead are healed 3d6 negative energy.
* A table of wish economy goods cost for easy referencing.
* A set of rules that can give a rough estimate how difficult it is to trade for an item taking into account the population density of a region, the rarity of the item and how specific the search query is (perhaps modified by the PC stats). Considering that you want to encourage randomness, I'd assume that finding exactly what you want in a magic shop should not be something that happens often.
* A table for dolling out magic items at specific levels, a WBL for magic items if you will, for easy referencing. And maybe a table for those of us that want to keep minor items in the game. Also how much gold/wish economy stuff the players should have at those levels, taking into account the number of items dolled out.
I made a few calculations and at level 8 the player has 7 lesser items which is 28,000 gp, 1,000 gp higher than the current WBL. But at level 14 the player has 4 moderate items and one greater item, which is 94,000 gp. 56,000 gp fewer than the standard WBL at this level. Unless I'm confused by how the system is supposed to work.
* A feat for crafting magical tattoos. Preferably one that can be used with psionics if you are using those.