I'm not familiar enough with Rogue to comment on how its ID system worked. Speaking generally, using an un-IDed item in a bad situation and praying that it does something good is not the most interesting aspect of ID systems. In a roguelike, if an action has a 10% of completely screwing you over, you probably never ever want to do that thing, so more often you either wait for a reliable source of IDs (Scroll of Identify) or you wait until you have two of something and then use one in an empty room, neither of those making for particularly fascinating gameplay.
There are already lots of things in roguelikes that have a perpetual chance of backfiring against the user (like miscast spells) and they mainly seem to piss players off.
Brogue does the ID game well, and it stays relevant well into the game. The game has a fairly small set of possible items and provides a helpful list which one's you've identified, and it's possible to identify an item as Good or Bad without using it,
so process of elimination is more meaningful, and you can make intelligent gambles or judgments about resource management. Interestingly, it's the only roguelike I can think of where Scrolls of Identify are relatively rare (or even not the most common object in the game).
Nethack has a very involved system -- maybe too involved -- but they sure did something with it.
