I have not played ToME yet, but I share DarkGod's feelings about the consumables. There are lots of games where consumables are mostly junk (not powerful enough to care about, or available in a huge supply so they no longer work like consumables), like Angband variants and ADOM.
In general there are two kinds of consumables: temporary (offensive wands, potions of healing, speed) and permanent ones (potion of strength, scroll of identify). It's the temporary ones which cause problems. I don't remember using wands in ADOM, other than the wand of wishing (permanent), wand of cold (used for a special permanent purpose), and maybe wand of trap creation (permanent purpose). I tend to never or almost never use temporary consumables, in ADOM and other games. Especially in the games where the inventory is bounded, weak temporary consumables are often simply not worth it to carry.
That's why most wands and other magical items in my Vapors of Insanity are designed as items which charge themselves from a mana source (such as PC), except some of the more powerful ones (that would be permanents). To prevent abuse (carrying a huge backpack filled with charged powerful wands) the power is lost when not connected to a mana source. I still have temporary potions, but I don't like them, and I am thinking about replacing them with something better (I especially hate how illogical it is that you can magically create a potion of speed or whatever, but you cannot store it in a bottle). I have read somewhere an idea that potions should have an expiry date, this could work. It would be logical with herbs, which could have magical effects only shortly after picking.
But I think it is possible to do consumables correctly, too. Crawl has powerful potions of healing, but a limited number of them. A Crawl player finds potions of healing at some find rate, and uses them at use rate. The find rate is constant, but use rate depends on the player's skill. As a newbie, my use rate was higher than the find rate, so my supply of potions of healing was depleted, and, well, game over. As I got more and more skilled, my use rate finally became lower than the find rate, allowing me to win the game. Crawl also has some very powerful wands, which really help in hard fights, and similarly work as a tool whose find/use rate is used to decide when to allow the player to win.
I am also happy with how things work in my Hydra Slayer. Consumables are found in a limited quantity (a must for meaningful consumables), and there are some permanent, and some temporary ones. However, since health does not regenerate for free in Hydra Slayer, it becomes a permanent. A typical situation is that you can win a battle losing lots of health, or use a temporary consumable. In other words, you can trade your temporary consumable for a permanent health bonus (and your job is to find the right moment, when the health bonus will be the biggest). This makes them somewhat permanent themselves, and work as a real resource.
Regarding Cataclysm and Curses... I used to be a follower of Curses (and similar ways of using the system console), but nowadays, libtcod becomes a new standard, and I am even myself helping to make it overcome its disadvantages (by adding the NotEye/streaming support, so we will be able to play libtcod games over network, not only for the Curses ones)... probably we should switch to it.
