For nearly thirty years I have made my villains via the random method, with very few exceptions.  That said, I think there are times when the GM might need to craft some things to get what he or she is truly after.  It never hurts to roll randomly, though, to spark the creative juices!   

Well I tended to craft the villains to fit the world and the player (and NPC) Heroes.

Since I used the source Material so much it was rare that I actually made up villains unless they were International ones (as the supplements gave me lots of fodder for the Heroes to play with).

I modified many of the existing villains in the supplements to fit my campaign. A great example of this is my reworking of ALL of the characters from Opponents Unlimited - Particularly B.A.D. (See: http://www.villainsandvigilantesforum.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1252458748/4...  Re: Which published charactes have you used Reply #4 - Sep 10th, 2009 at 10:43pm).

I used to make up one shot villains or low levelers for cannon fodder (usually used by organizations... sort of a one power human thing... not powerful enough to be an actual villain... but certainly more personally powerful than most normal humans).

G7