DCSS works exactly like this: plenty of monsters don't drop anything useful. The other mobs rarely drop anything that useful (except for ammo). Actually, it turns out to be a great game.
I agree that DCSS is a great game, but I think that its loot system leaves much to be desired. Don't get me wrong, the user interface for item and inventory management is smooth as buttered silk (if you know your history, this is in fact the reason for DCSS's ascendance in the first place), but it merely serves to make tolerable the practice of sifting through mountains of worthless garbage to get at the goodies.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that monster drops in DCSS are universally useless, with the following exceptions: corpses, artifacts dropped by unique monsters, and a few god abilities that are powered by dungeon trash (with Jiyva's being the only one that's actually interesting). Other than that, all interesting items in the player's possession will have generated either randomly or via vault loot.
