Voted no. On your first point, there may be specific requests for changing item values, but your statement is far too general to help fix this. Hurthling cakes weigh less than large rations and thus are dearer. Emeralds selling for higher makes perfect sense in a loot-centric game - finding an emerald is a bit like finding gold. Potion of booze is a consumable item, and in the early game in particular isn't worth as much as a standard weapon. Value is a subjective thing, and no perfect system will ever by found. The existing system is mostly fine for what it is, in my opinion. If you have some solid suggestions of tweaks then make them instead of requesting an overhaul based on your vaguely defined values.

On the second point, I just don't see how this can be practically improved. What would you use as a standard? The unreliable system at present? Some imagined "value" rating? Also there are times when a cheap bunch of rocks or arrows is really handy in a store. Overall stores are very good, I find, so I don't mind a bit of junk here and there. Might as well complain about these items ever dropping in the game.

Other issue is that PC is the only customer in the whole Ancardia. Why shopkeepers doesn't sell items while PC is far away and why other creatures don't buy anything?

1. Nothing illogical whatsoever. You are trying to judge the values based on what the PC would want, not what the average Ancardia denizen would want. In a world with so many fierce, evil creatures, access to a weapon, any weapon, is better than nothing. On the other hand, most people in Ancardia wouldn't know which end of a wand to point in which direction, so the potion of booze is cheaper, since to most people it's just alcohol. Hurthling Cakes may not be of significant benefit to the PC, but the average Ancardian would probably prefer the delicious Hurthling Cake over the practical-but-not-particularly-tasty Large Ration. Emeralds are more valuable to the average Ancardian for the same reason as why a gold ring is more valuable than most books in the real world.

Throwing Clubs of Death may be undervalued, perhaps. Or maybe not - a one-shot, heavy club that isn't really useful for anything but throwing. It could probably do with a bit of a price bump.

2. A similar problem, here - you're thinking from the PC's perspective. Think about it from the shopkeeper's perspective - they have access to some sort of supply chain. From that supply chain, they get a batch of products. Many of them aren't worth much... but the shopkeeper still needs to sell them. You also assume that, because they're not of particular value to the PC, they wouldn't be of particular value to anybody. I'm sure that a Giant would quite like to grab that Huge Rock - it would be a useful weapon or tool for them. That Mild Scalpel of Weakness is probably quite useful for surgery, or perhaps for study by various researchers (as a curiosity - why would someone create such an object, and what benefits might it have?). A regular outlaw would probably quite like having a Hood to help hide their face when needing to travel in more Lawful regions.

If there were going to be any changes at all to the system, I'd like to see a loyalty discount, automatic piling of identical objects (the resulting empty spaces needn't be automatically refilled), and perhaps a tendency for shopkeepers to explicitly name valuable items, while leaving non-valuable items unIDed (to prevent easy identification of the crap items from the decent items). Why? Because it makes the shop look better.

"Valuable" could be judged based on some standard price measure (before shopkeeper variations) for each type of item. Each class of Weapon, for instance - the typical sword might cost 100 gp, so anything above 200 gp before shopkeeper variations would get IDed automatically by a shopkeeper. But this is just a side idea, if Thomas feels like putting extra work in for little benefit (in other words, I don't expect this one to happen - the loyalty discount and automatic piling, on the other hand, should be fairly straightforward to implement).

Ancardia is bigger than the Drakalor Chain. And it's only due to the incursions of Chaos that there aren't many people buying items.

That said, I'd like to see the shops in the villages (HMV, Lawenilothehl, Terinyo, and Dwarftown) have some extra activity from residents while the PC is away. It would put a little more tension on leaving that AoLS in the black market shop until you can afford it, and make Dwarftown less safe for storage of the Chaos corpses, for instance.

As a side note, it might be interesting if the value of certain items changes based on the race of the shopkeeper. I'd tie it to your racial sacrifice: Orc shopkeepers could pay/charge extra for weapons, because that's what orcs (and their gods) consider valuable, for example. A drakeling shopkeeper would pay/charge more for instruments.

I'd definitely support that... although I'm not sure that simply basing it on the racial sacrifice is the best option - after all, it would suck to get a High Elven ring shopkeeper, which seems somewhat backwards, since you'd expect them to consider trade of rings to be more important, and thus that there would be more competition.

I think that, rather than basing it on basic item category, it could be more based on certain... traits. Mist Elves would probably put a low price on anything made of Iron, while Gold items would probably be rated more highly by Dwarves. Trollish shopkeepers probably place higher value on heavier items, while Elves of all sorts would probably put higher value on lighter items (hence the existence of the very light Elven armour). Ratlings would probably place extra value on the artifacts, while Humans, perhaps, would consider them less important than most would.

They're all factors that are somewhat independent of item type, while still being relatively easy to implement, since the things that the price depends upon are still applied.

Can't say I'm a fan of any of the ideas in this thread. Current system seems to work pretty much fine (people use throwing clubs?) to me.

Throwing clubs of any kind selling for a few coins always felt like a bug to me, considering TCs of death do a decent amount of damage.

As for the rest, the others have explained it quite well. Why should most items in shops have to be useful in some way? The ADOM world certainly doesn't revolve around the PC's needs like on traditional RPGs. And this way, when one of them generates worn boots or jet-black battle axes, you appreciate them a lot more ;)