And honestly, I can think of no justification for a game designer to ask me to resist that temptation. The temptation simply should not be there. The problem is easy to solve: store a persistent random seed within the character save file. This way, the contents of any given chest are still random (and you don't open the whole pre-determined-loot can of worms), but you would get the same thing from that chest if you were to re-load and open the chest again.
I don't know of any programming language that doesn't let you specify the random seed in the call to the random number generator. Maybe BlitzMax doesn't allow this, but I'd be very surprised.
To me, this is a totally obvious technological fix to a (IMO) very annoying flaw in the game.
Of course, on a related note, I'd request that you reduce the variability of the results from chests somewhat. But that's a different thread.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)