I can't help but add that in games between equally skilled opponents, the winner is determined by luck 100% of the time. So, the smaller the skill gap between you and your opponent, the more luck-based it gets.
This gets boosted by some very dominant cards, like the High End Cantrips (Grand Market, Market, Bazaar, Peddler) or Curse Dealers.
Yes, it happens all too often my Sea Hag gets discarded by my opponent's and then it becomes a really hard fight.
With GMs it's even worse, because GMs enable the buying of even more GMs and soon it'll be a waterfall of GMs and it's 6/4 or 7/3 to your opponent's advantage and it's basically game over.
These are the games I least enjoy, those Curse races with Familiars and such ($2 + Potion on turn 3, gg) and those obvious dominant card races.
I like the games more where you can be subtle or change it up in a way your opponent doesn't suspect. I love to catch my opponent off guard by pushing some piles to depletion and snagging 1 Estate or Duchy along.
I played a Colony game today which I enjoyed that featured the following key cards: Ghost Ship, Venture, Treasure Map, Warehouse, Menagerie.
I spotted the very nice Warehouse/TM combo and was able to get my 4 Golds on turn 5 or 6, emptying out the Provinces as quickly as I could, buying Menageries or Golds with less than $8. Menagerie works well as a counter to Ghost Ship, you can just place the doubles on top of your deck and draw them + 1 extra.
My point is that it's often easy to get tempted to go for Colonies just as your opponent does and in that case, it's just a luck race for the first Platinums. Often, there are other ways to win and it's in the finesse of these games that we get our enjoyment out of it.
Dominion can be really exciting when you're trying to maintain an early lead and hold off an opponent, your deck getting greener with every buy, fending for Duchies and Estates untill your opponent can't catch up any more.
I think we have to realize that with ~150 available cards, there will always be dominant ones and sucky ones and the games with either won't be very interesting. If we leave out the best 50 and the worst 50, there are still 10 billion potentially interesting setups.
The bad part is however, that there will never be retrospective adjustments for cards that are either too powerful or too sucky. The text on the cards is set in stone and we have to live with it for as long as we play. You have Throne Room, Throne Room, Great Hall and 2 Colonies in your hand, play TR-TR-GH, draw an Ambassador with a Colony and have to let your opponent pick up 2 Colonies? Oof! Do the same with King's Court and you're fine, just don't play the Ambassador.
All in all, Dominion is and always will be a game and in the first place it was meant to be played in real life with friends and you can play 3 or 4 games on one night and have a different experience every time. Now that we have BSW and Isotropic, the game has a tendency to become overanalyzed too quickly and we think too much about it.
No, indeed it's not chess and it doesn't even close to pretend that it is. It's a deck-building game with shuffling, aka luck, deal with it.
The fun part is, you can start a new game in mere seconds (on Isotropic) or minutes (real life)! Pick yourself up and try again.