Let's point out an obvious thing: humans, at least, DO NOT habitually eat raw meat. Which is, basically, what corpses are. Our teeth are no longer any good for tearing hunks of raw muscle.
So maybe a possible solution would be to make finding corpses easier, but to give them very low satiation values (for most races - orcs or trolls would probably not mind raw meat, on the other hand it might be fun to have a herbivore race that is unable to digest meat and has to eat vegetarian food - of course, it could graze on moss growing on dungeon walls in the case of necessity :) ).
On the other hands, cooking could be made much more important. After all, most fantasy adventurers DO have some cooking skills, they don't eat their loot raw. In ADOM, hurthlings are (I think) the only race that starts with Cooking, so how about giving it to humans, elves, dwarves etc. too?
Another thing is that cooking could become harder to use. For example, I think that it should require lighting a fire on the floor (pretty hard in a dungeon, unless you bring your own wood or something similar).
Another concern as to monster equipment is the size. Generally, if you defeat a quickling, and he drops his armor, there is not a big chance it would fit. Another reason to filter out items - armor and helmet might only drop from monsters of similar size as yourself (unless you're, say, a skilled weaponsmith, in which case you could melt them down for metal). With weapons, it;s more tricky - a two-handed sword used by a hurthling is like a knife for a troll (the damage would be the same, but it would get to-hit penalties, as it's not used the way it was intended to).
Hmm, what would you say to this system?
When you start the game, monsters will drop everything that gets generated, including useless things you can't use. But you can go to the "junk manager" screen, and mark any particular type of items as "junk". The game will then give descriptions as following:
On the floor lies:
orcish knife
orcish robe
3 pieces of junk
You could then enter a command "junk-dive" which would force the game to give you detailed information about the junk on the floor.
You could mark items as "junk" only based on their type (not, for example, based on the bonuses they give, since you don't actually see that - you have to try the item out for that).
Should a particularly good item of "junk" category be generated, there would be a check based on your Perception, Appraising, and perhaps Detect Item Status - if successful, the item would be separated from junk and marked as "unusual", otherwise it will be included in the junk.
Could this work?