Expansion adds way more randomness. Honestly too much at times even for me.
Jokes aside, the chaos in Innovation is overstated (except for 4p, which can be a bit wild, but not 2-3) and honestly everyone I've seen complain about it has played it 1-3 times or just never bothered to even try to learn the game right and went in with the mindset that it's "all luck," which couldn't be farther from the truth.
narcosis nailed it -- it's a game about tactics much more so than just picking a single strategy very early on like Dominion or RFTG. Really every hand is like a puzzle and I think the haters would be shocked at how many clever ways there are to be successful in the game. I've seen a decent amount of "well, X had way more icons than me so I just gave up; it was never close." Argh! It's not RFTG or whatever where you just build up an engine and coast the rest of the way. Hey let's talk about random, get a nice start hand in RFTG or 5 coppers in Dominion and you have the win button in your hands. But if a game gives you the ability to use clever tactics to overcome an early deficit OH NOES THE RANDOMS!
You are always in peril if your opponents are clever enough. That said, there are definitely goals that you can build toward -- like having a big infrastructure and just killing people on dogmas, or having an early scoring machine and ending the game early while others are trying to build themselves up, or conversely having a late scoring machine and focusing on getting to Age 11, but you will get eclipsed if you just rest on your laurels and don't make adjustments on the fly to what others are doing.
If anything, I would say Innovation is way
underrated.
Not to say that it's for everyone, I get the singleton setup can be difficult for some, as can adjusting to the playstyle. And yeah with 4 as I said above it can get fairly crazy.
