I should start with what made me want to make changes to the loot drops:

1) Everyone, I am certain, experienced it: Certain items (namely Blueprints of Water Jar, Medium Crop Plot and/or Compass) dropped way too often compared to everything else. So often in fact that I could not imagine that to be intended.

2) Frustration, when again looting real low level stuff from a red beacon or yellow cave crate or whatever. In fact especially from cave crates. This results in higher level items becoming exceedingly rare even if only hunting appropriate beacons or crates.

3) Some items never showed up in any loot drop, first and foremost (but not exclusively) most newly added stuff.

And now what I didn't want to do:

1) Push the power level of loot drops to the point where getting all geared up in high quality equipment would be too easy. There are similar mods out there which do exactly that.

2) Make the loot drops feel like a christmas tree for dropping multiple interesting items all the time. Again there are mods out there which do that.

3) Only include "the good stuff" and count out any common loot. I always liked the idea of hunting for stuff instead of taking it for granted so I kept the luck factor in the hunt for loot.

So, what exactly DID I do?

I completely reworked every loot table which affected The Island and The Center beacon, cave and ocean drops. The new loot tables can be viewed in my other pinned thread.

First of all I removed all basic building stuff like foundations, walls and ceilings as well as electric or irrigation related items. The reasons behind this were a) I feel that base building is something that happens according to a plan and not just because you just looted some wall tiles and b) I and the people I use to play with totally prefer the base building items from the Structures Plus mod (which I can recommend without second thoughts) and I just didn't figure out how to integrate stuff from other mods into my loot drops the clean way.

The next thing I did was looking into the reasons for higher tier drops including low level stuff and that's what I found: The vanilla loot drops use the same system of dividing all the loot into separate loot tiers as I did, but do one thing completely different
-> Where a level 60 beacon from my mod only uses the loot table for level 60 drops the vanilla beacons take the level 60 list, the level 45 list, the level 35 list and the level 25 list and give each a chance of generating the loot for that same level 60 beacon, resulting in only about 34% (that's because of different weights of different lists) of the loot to actually be taken from the level 60 list. In caves it's even worse with only 25% (the weights are all even here) of all red crates to actually have tier 4 loot. So I decided it would feel better to give each tier of loot it's very own loot list.
But another thing was the starting level of cave loot which I felt was definitely too low (who exactly would get excited about those pretty blue cloth pants in a crate behind dozens of spiders, titanoboas and arthroplueras?). So I removed most loot which noone would ever use at a character level at which you can beat a cave.

So the next thing was to look at the number of items a distinct loot drop could generate. The vanilla drops worked as follows:
1 item for: all cave crates, ocean drops and white or green beacons
1 or 2 items for: blue, purple and yellow beacons
1 to 3 items for: red beacons
2 items for: white through yellow double beacons
3 items for: red double beacons
Note that some "items" on the original loot lists actually stand for a complete set of items so the resulting numbers may differ.
As I reduced the pool of potential loot in most loot lists, I had to take that into my consideration to compensate for that fact and what I did was:
1 item for: all cave drops and normal beacons
1 or 2 items for: all double beacons
Note again that my loot lists too have some few "items" that stand for multiple items at once (especially if resources are involved).

Now the number of potential items per drop isn't the only thing that makes the double beacons differ from the normal ones; it's also the potential quality of each dropped item. So the next step was to look into quality, not only between normal or double beacons but also for cave and ocean loot.
I don't know if anyone besides the devs at wildcard wholly understands the complete quality system, but what I learned during the work on my mod was the following:
The quality of an item is represented by a number between 1 (for primitive) and 10 (or even more for ascendant). A loot table can assign a basic quality for an item, the source of the drop which uses that loot table (a beacon for example) can assign a multiplier and it seems unclear if the server difficulty will affect beacons or crate quality, too.
I didn't change the basic quality of beacon drops and only slightly raised it for cave loot, but what I did was change some multipliers. First of all I reduced the quality difference between normal and double beacons a bit. The multipliers were 1.0 for normal and 2.0 to 2.5 for double beacons and now are 1.0 to 1.5 for normal and 1.5 to 2.5 for double.
Next I had to even out the multipliers for cave loot as they ranged from 1.0 to 1.75 for green crates up to 3.25 to 4.0 for red crates. Besides the fact that a green crate was inferior to a green double beacon qualitywise, it would have been impossible to get good quality tier 1 cave loot that way as that no longer drops from higher level crates. So I assigned each and every cave crate a multiplier between 2.0 to 4.0 so that the resulting quality was consistent over all tiers (and cave crates being superior to beacons again).

Another major point on my to-do list was a redistribution of saddles and their blueprints as I found that most newer saddles were exclusive to ocean crates or the new underwater caves. So as I found it undesireable to force people into one specific new cave (or to the bottom of the ocean) to get the new saddles I looked at a complete list of every creature which can have a saddle in ARK and assigned them to different loot tiers, mostly only considering required level to learn and only in some instances judging them on how exotic the creature might be. Noteworthy at this point is that I granted cave loot a broader selection of saddles than the beacons.
In the same process I redistributed some other items to new loot tables mainly because I found no good reason to exclude them from the average loot (namely the crossbow or the shields) and added some items which were newer included in any loot table as I found it appropriate to be able to loot them from somewhere and if only as a better form of filler loot.

Well, that was quite much already, although I am certain that there was still more to it while I worked on the project but I shall call it at this point for now.