1. The idea is to introduce some randomness into the Sun's vision without losing the sense of control needed to keep things strategic. Sometimes, randomness can be unforgiving, and losing a bet is a real possibility—but don’t forget the suit proportions in the deck. If you take the bird into account, you actually have a lot of options.
2. You can do that, but after playtesting, it turned out that strategies like this tend to make you more vulnerable than anything else. If you try it, everyone will see what you're doing and they'll try to burn you to ashes before your next Birdsong. Scoring at the start of your turn is actually part of that balance (and in a way sun's vision is a part of that too and Offering is obviously to cournter the idea that you can just stay in a corner and wait... if you can't do offering you'll lose some points and crafting stations to score more points).

