The way I see things is that as a developer, it's better to implement parts of your game around the concept of crafting a play experience, as opposed to just putting stuff in and letting people take it or leave it. That sounds well and good (to give people options), but it fails to acknowlege the reality of human behavior. The reality is that your choices directly motiavate or demotivate people to perform specific actions (and in the meta-sense, to play or quit your game).
To use an example that I think we can all agree upon, if you started people off with a 0-2 damage club that has AP cost 5, and then added a 0-1 damage club with AP cost 5 to the list of inventory in the starting store, you're telling the player to ignore the item in the store. At the same time, you're indicating to people who understand a little bit about game design that you actually don't know what you're doing, because you wasted valuable development time implementing something that is completely useless. This is worse than if the store simply sold nothing at all, because you actually wasted your real-life time designing bad equipment instead of building a better game designing something meaningful. A claim could be made that it is valuable to offer weaker options to people that may wish to put themselves into "hard mode" and take them, but that ignores the fact you could do the same thing by simply making the starter club in this example the weaker one, and making the store-bought one the stronger, so such a claim would not really make sense in the big-picture scope of things.
The reason this all applies to the discussion is that regardless of how a person discovers RoLS, once they do (and realize it's the best-in-slot), then they are faced with the No-Win scenario I already outlined. I don't see how this can be considered a good idea to leave alone given that it's only modestly acceptable in the face of player ignorance, and then once that is removed even that claim can't be made.
Nyktos's point about incentivizing someone to build skills with a Hex Editor is kind of cool, but if that's your reasoning, how about simply including a Hex Editor with the game so people don't have to risk downloading malware? Somehow, I don't think that's really the point here. What I would suggest is that instead of explaining how you implemented it as an (easily discoverable) Easter Egg, ask yourself what the point of including such an Easter Egg is, and what the result of including it is. Intentions are really nice, but results are what matter, right?
There are a lot of fun and cool Easter Eggs you might include that won't incentivize mindless grinding (like a hidden cave where you lay out small rocks in a pattern to bring up a secret list of all the Andor's Trail contributors). Easter Eggs that affect gameplay should be considered a no-no. The minute that they affect your game, they stop being Easter Eggs and turn into part of the game itself.
You don't need anything to beat Andor's Trail, as far as I know, so the point doesn't really seem relevant. Either way, it's not a reason to include any old thing you can think of without care for consequences (to player sanity, if nothing else). ^^
