There actually is, but you need to use the console for it.
Type this: character.GrantPlayerToken ULTIMATE_MECHANIC_DEACTIVATED
To undo this type: character.RevokePlayerToken ULTIMATE_MECHANIC_DEACTIVATED
This is completely untested so don’t know if there are any side-effects! Don’t recommend it though, the mechanic should get easier to handle later on.
The God Mechanic is explained here in-depth: The Gods Are Watching You
So in short there are quite many ways you can influence favor, such as completing quests and dungeons, or when something good happens, you lose favor, and when something bad happens, you gain favor. Blessings also decrease favor greatly. This might lead to it jumping around, but it should be predictable.
But in the end, favor only represents the chance that the good event happens instead of the bad one, so 17000 favor is quite high, but “only” a ~80% chance for something good.
Basically your goal would be to keep doing stuff — e.g. when a good event happens and you lose lots of favor (amount is slightly random), you got around 20 minutes (also slightly random, to prevent a clear pattern) to get it back up. Sounds stressful, but this should happen naturally, since so much stuff gives you favor (at least further into the campaign).
The whole God Mechanic is intended to be the downside to the Blessings, so without them you would probably only get the good events.
Some areas are clustered with breakable objects, such as the urns or the secret crate level. This was looking and playing very weird with so many objects, so I removed the outline. I also like it more.
Never thought about the corpses, I just forgot about using them!
Diablo 3 uniques should drop normally too and yes to “only as unique”.
Soulbound for some item types does not work in Custom Game, don’t know why. By the way, ignoring the Soulbound flag angers the gods.
Ruined Shrine symbol is only there to show the location of the Devotion Sphere. Normally the symbol should disappear after the sphere is popped, but for some reason this also does not work (sometimes). You will notice this behavior in the Illusionary Dungeon later on. Weird stuff.
Gotta check out the upcoming third community season then (when it drops)!
There is lots of great stuff up ahead, some even quite easy to miss, so great to hear that you already enjoy the beginning!
Thanks for the long write-up and the feedback, greatly appreciated!