Selection is not gambling. It is a critical part of the manual design process. Designers always come out with multiple design possibilities before they narrow down to one. This happens thorough the design process at every level of detail and the final outcome is very much depended on these selections. Don’t see the gambling element here.
As far as companies are concerned, they pay designers to come up with designs that people are likely to buy. Their own existence depends on it. How the designers come up with the solution, they do not really care. They would certainly welcome the opportunity to select possibly through consumer testing designs that are likely to succeed, without shooting in the dark according to the hunches of the designer - which is exceedingly risky.
This stuff that you describe happens more than 10,000 times every second in your PC and has no connection to curious tools.
Curious tools are primarily for intangible complex issues that are beyond the capability of computational processes. There is plenty of other software to deal with the rest. No software that I know of is written to give human being a chance to calculate because it can do some calculations too. If a human being is involved, its primarily because that involvement is necessary.
Did not say it takes weeks. Depends very much on the complexity. Running or the program takes less than 10 minutes. But then you need a properly structured CAD model. So this model building time is related to the CAD model building time. What you need to create is nothing more than a CAD model, but structured in way that it can be parametrically varied. I see that you design shoes. Once basic model is built, parts of it (that are common to all shoes) can be re-used many times allowing you to create many different designs. In a way this method forces efficiency on you as you need to build variable models instead of static models. So, the overall time that you spent on design will significantly reduce specially in cases where the product type remains the same.
It would be best to verify this. Would you like to participate in the planned “Manual method vs Curios Tools” contest ?
Else, you can try using Curious tools yourself and make your own conclusion. I would be happy to help you try it out, I am sure that you will be able to create some interesting shoe designs.