As in, the problem is with it being time consuming to build an environment which is interesting to engage in by players without becoming a One True Solution trap.
This becomes massively more difficult if players and environment pieces explicitly have access to each other's rules(this btw, is why D&D had the drow weapons become junk in sunlight, otherwise the PCs will loot all of them and become super powerful, and why the druid is OP).
The key to effective large monster design isn't in the mechanical hook, which is a guessing game of GM and Player sync, made worse if you have hard-of-comprehension players playing at the end of a long day(or in one case, high as a kite).
What would help(instead of add more work which 90% of the time is never used by the end of the encounter) is a quick way to generate interactive details. You need something like 3-4 standout features which the players might choose to engage in, to in turn produce leveragable actions. This applies for dungeons, chase scenes and even social scenes, people tend to do better if in an action-reaction cycle rather than pure creativity, much as the latter is more novel, it takes more ongoing work and can be chancy outside of dedicated creative groups.
Whats needed then is:
-Interactive scenery generator. This is usually stunt fodder, which yes, in theory your player would stunt into existence, but in practice happens a lot less. Throwaway details, like rusting railings, humming power conduits, people carrying glass panes, trapdoors, or Glowy Crystal Thing. That and as GM you somewhat need to control the urge, so pre-generated randoms tend to work better than conveniently spawning exactly what is needed. Sure, you could probably invent this any one scene, but without assistance you're probably going to wind up recycling them repeatedly.
-Gauging potency and providing complications which engage players at a level of useful risk. What makes sense for this scene, what hazards are they just going to ignore? Theres a lot of tendency when rushed to just eyeball and scale it to player competencies, but players do tend to call bullshit after the 3rd backwater sorceror has a vat of Difficulty 5 acid in their lab, OR they can get bored as the lightning barrier, poison gas, horrific visages, etc, run up against their superhuman Integrity/Resistance and does nothing much.
I think my system does something similar to what you're describing, although coming at it from a different perspective. Engagement with terrain is a core mechanic, so there are a bunch of rules for representing interesting things in the environment, from railings to power counduits to people carrying glass panes to trapdoors, etc. Some are represented by pretty generic, abstracted mechanical ideas, others have very specific mechanical hooks (like having a magnetized floor). There's no "roll on this table to generate interesting environmental details" table (although I might add one when I create the GM's section eventually, as I'm going to have a lot of similar kinds of guidance), but there is a list of a lot of
stuff that you can look through and get inspired.
Since this subsystem is one of the ones getting heavily changed soon, I'll explain the high level pitch for the new version (the core engine works on a dice management system whereby spending dice to roll well in one action means having less dice to do on other stuff, so that even minor hazards can still be annoying because they take effort away from other things):
Combat/social encounters/stuff that happens in a given space takes place on a series of connected Zones. Characters are placed and can move between Zones—their location within a given Zone is abstracted unless they're specifically doing something in one area within it. Zones can have two kinds of Traits—continuous and activated (names might also be changed).
Continuous Traits do something automatically to everyone in the Zone, representing some property found in the entire area. If that something is bad, characters will generally need to roll over some listed Difficulty to avoid the bad thing.
Activated Traits only do something if a Character "activates" them, but this can be slightly misleading. A lava pool in the middle of a Zone, for example, is an Activated Trait. Activating it represents trying to throw someone in, and is done via an opposed move action, with a Difficulty rating substracted from the guy who's attempting to do it's roll. Succeed and the guy falls into lava and probably dies.
Characters can also generate new Activated Traits in a given Zone via perception actions—so a character can look at your evil villain lair, say "I want there to be a lava pit", roll well, and then generate it into the environment. The same is true for stuff like weapons lying around, explosive barrels in the enemy camp, obstacles up ahead that the other car will need to dodge, etc.
The end result, at least from early playtests, is that PCs have been engaging really heavily with the environment, to the extent that "guy who knows things and is vigilant but doesn't fight much" has been a viable engaging archetype in a combat game. It's definitely easier for me to GM than it might be for someone else, but I think that having enough prebuilt content will allow other people to pretty easily go in and make it work.
