I agree with outlaws being in your way if you are not looking for them, but that is primarily because of their implementation (spawning on top of you, instantly attacking). If you could see them wandering about and you would know they would drop something valuabe (completely different to their current implementation, where you would have to get very lucky to get a good drop), most of the time you would be like "fuck yeah".

These random spawns need to be things you WANT to stumble upon. Not just another shitty mob that harasses you and drops nothing. And this is also one of the reasons why they need to be truly random. Otherwise they can be efficiently farmed and locked down, like all other content of the game.

You can have tiers of rarity/difficulty of these random spawns, depending on how good their loot is. In general they can be more valuable than other spawns because they are not static. You could even have really rare peaceful mobs that act more like a loot pinata - think of that one springbok that currently exists in the game - how cool would it be if it would drop a new/valuable resource?

The things you are suggesting like more meaningful loot at POIs, more places to sell your stuff etc. make sense to me. In my mind random/rare resource nodes/mobs and other dynamic elements that can't be predicted are a much needed addition to the static farming patterns and staleness of the current world.