Is the luck factor indeed overwhelming in the Catan Card Game?
No, not in my experience. In fact, the Catan Card Game has a great depth of strategy and many ways to offset the luck of the dice.

Your chances will be greatly helped if you've found a Scout card, certainly. It should ALWAYS be one of your starting cards if you have the chance. If you don't, then you know there's one in the three stacks that neither of you searched to start with. Use the ability to cycle a card from hand, and pay two useless resources (gold, or sheep or corn) to search more stacks for a Scout.

When you do get a Scouted settlement, choose the numbers carefully. I try to choose a brick or ore that has the same number as my gold hex, so I get a real resource on every number. You could do the opposite and deliberately seek out both 5s so that you have a natural choice to Alchemist for.

After a game or two you acquire something of an instinct for which cards are good early, good late, good all the time (Merchant), or never good. Cycle your hand aggressively: you should always be aiming to draw a card per turn unless you have a really perfect hand.

There are several different approaches / strategies for how you deal with the event die, depending on your attitude to the luck of the game. If you're playing cautiously, you'll try to keep windmill points at least balanced with your opponent so they can't steal from you, and try to seek out tournament-point knights to get the tournament resources. I personally tend to go for the windmill token anyway as one of my 11 VP.