Do you often play Heroes of Might and Magic II and V? In those games, everything is reproduced (in V, it's completely independent of the previous playthrough, and in II, I haven't checked). And it really does happen that you can find completely insane, advantageous setups, but more often, you need morale for a powerful stack on the first turn, and it just doesn't work out. In my experience, battles in II and V are much closer to "real" battles than what could be generated before in III. I haven't fully understood the mechanism of the changed generation, so I can't say for sure, but there is real hope that the battles will become less "fantastic" and take less time.
The only question that has already been raised is: how much can you manipulate the weight, but it's better to ask the programmers about that.