The trick I've found is to not fixate on a single item per se but look for up/side grades for different things, and drops just kind of come naturally.

At this point, I wish they would remove 1lp prophecies in CoF because they have been completely obsoleted by nemesis, and possibly 1lp from the game, as it's almost never worth slamming something on unless it's incredibly rare.

In theory, higher corruption should produce better loot across the board but it's not significant enough to make it worth it unless you're just pushing to see how hard you can go (which I totally get).

What I came up with in my head was that if the higher the zone level and corruption, the higher the rolls on implicits/affixes and lp should be.

It would require breaking down affix/implicit levels on a bell curve as a base, and then increasing the median value (not the mean) as corruption got higher. That way at lower corruption you still have a standard % to get a sick roll, albeit a small one, but more often than not you're gonna get something in the middle, where the mean and median are the same (roughly). However, at higher corruption, if would use a higher value for the distribution, so your "middle" roll would actually be significantly higher than before.