Agreed, I would give TFM a raring of luck 2. Starting hand + Draft are the two luck aspects of the game, and as you noted, strong players have ample opportunity to mitigate the bad luck in those aspects of the game.
7 Wonders? Some of the player boards are just not good. And then, what if player B decides to bury a crucial card for player C? Now player C will never have the production necessary for a good score, and player B may have taken a suboptimal action in doing so. Player A benefits, and player C is screwed, and there was nothing player C could do about it.
Sometimes the 7-card hand will be unavoidably bad for one player. The mechanisms for dealing with this are somewhat limited. Eventually, 2 cards will need to be played from each of the 3 hands dealt out, so no matter how well a player sets up a plan/strategy, it may be the case that one of the 3 hands has too many needed cards and one of the hands has 1 or no useful ones.
And then there's the .... I forget what the in-game mechanism is. When you pay a neighbor for a resource. In one game (home game), one opponent kept buying only from the other player. I had no chance. At the first opportunity, I buried a crucial card for that player. That player was annoyed. I said, "well, you made sure I couldn't win, what else were you expecting me to do? Next time buy equally from your opponents, or at least maybe 40/60 or something."
The player who is getting short-changed in this manner has on control over this. If one player wants to always buy from the same player, oh well. The inherent nature of the game leads to kingmaking.
Note that 7 wonders Duel has a high Elo of 895, and 34 players at or near 600. Even though that game has a good bit of randomness when a new card id flipped over.
