It sounds like you don't know what to look for in Drafts.
On the 1st cycle, decks are passed to your right. Remember which colors are getting passed to you, especially on turn 7+ in the Draft. this tells you which colors players on your left are _NOT_ going.
On the 2nd cycle, booster-packs are passed to your left. Same same, you're getting information from the other side of the table, so you know what to hate-draft (a draft-pick to hurt someone, rather than help yourself) in the 3rd phase.
The drafting phase also tells you which bombs and removal cards to look out for. Of course, 1st deck / 1st pick bombs are always taken and are fully secret, but 3rd round, its unlikely that the rare is going to be in the colors of your left-side opponent. So there's a good chance that the rare-to-your-left is passed to you, giving you information on what that opponent has drafted (whether that card matched their deck or not).
There are also incredibly powerful commons (ex: Lightning Bolt a few years ago...) that would be 1st-draft 1st-pick and better than the rare. So if you're 2nd pick and there's a good rare on the passed deck, it means the person to your left is likely going red/lightning bolt 1st pick.
Or in another set, when Doom Blade was in format, that'd be the 1st-pick / 1st draft card as a very powerful removal spell despite being a common.
> that almost never give me a useful deck in the end.
But everyone has the same condition in a draft. The card pool is closed: everyone had access to the same card pool and is therefore nearly fair. Obviously if your 1st pack / 1st pick was much better than everyone else's, that's a bit of the luck to the draft.
The "goal" of Draft is to pick the color that "the table has ignored". If your 7 other opponents are white, red, blue, green, red, green, and white... then you can pickup all the powerful black-cards. The "winner" of the draft will likely be fought between blue vs black (the only two "uninterrupted drafters") in the table that set.
There's only so many good cards for any given strategy. If *EVERYONE* goes early-aggro / rushdown (IE: White/Red/Green), then the one guy who drafted all the control cards (Blue/Black) probably just beats everyone at the table.
-----------
I'd say the main problem with Draft is the unbalanced nature of it all. If you're sitting to the right of a newbie who passes you good cards (or is otherwise ignorant of the Drafting format), you end up building a deck far more powerful than everyone else.
IE: The biggest advantage you can get in a Draft is sitting to the right of a newbie (2x rounds where you pass to the right). The 2nd biggest advantage is sitting to the left of a newbie (1x round where you pass to the left).
But if everyone at the table is of roughly the same skill level, its a great format. The drafting phase innately self-balances, as everyone is picking (and changing their picks) in relation to what they've been passed.
---------
> I'd much rather spend $50 on a precon and another $20 or so on singles,
Competitive decks "in the meta" are closer to $200 to $500 in my experience. 60x cards, and a chunk of them cost $20 to $80.
Preparation and Money ruins the game since you're just buying up known combos and 4x of the best $50 cards that on the last tournament...