Would you really want to live in a world where cause & effect didn't work though? Where you could drive drunk, knowing that God would pull any innocent children out of your path? Where if you were ill and didn't get better, you knew it was because you were a bad person and deserved it?
If we have any free will at all, then our actions have to have consequences, and those consequences won't just affect us as individuals, because things interconnect. I can choose to buy fruit which has been brought halfway round the world, and my action contributes to global warming and some islander in the South Pacific is flooded out. Do you want God to stop me buying South African apples? Or to strike down the supermarket manager who stocked them? Or to blow the air currents back to how they should be, so we can keep on doing daft stuff without any harm done?
I think we can pray and God hears us, but that God usually acts by helping us to find ways of dealing with things for ourselves, or of accepting the fact that it can't be changed. I don't know how much intervention is possible - in theory I believe that God could intervene, but I don't think this world is set up in a way which makes that a good idea for the most part - it's like when you play a "God sim" computer game, once you start changing one little thing you end up spending ages tying down all the other loose ends that your single action created. Each intervention is more likely to make things more complicated instead of better.
I don't think this is because Satan has been given charge of us - that's definitely not mainstream Christian teaching - but I do think that this universe was created via processes of evolution, and that the things we experience as bad are often the results of that.