Part of the disconnect perhaps stems from how Incredibly different a direction Blizzard went in for DIII versus, say, the various ambitious community mods that slowly managed to crop up over the many years, often having to dodge around patches and all sorts of nonsense. D1 to DII was a progression on a few fronts, and based on the mods, what folks were hankering for was more and different and deeper----really it parallels the whole vanilla Angband and the many variants syndrome. People wanted more of the sorts of things that "If Only.." Blizzard would pay more attention to the post release support after the LoD expansion that the sky was the limit, yet they were derailed by their pesky other projects like Starcraft and WoW. Whereas Angband eventually garnered the likes of Quickband, something like Sil, and currently a Minimalband sifting things out----I'm not aware offhand of any "streamlining" or reductionist stuff for D2 or D1.
Based on what I've seen, Blizzard has either outright cut much in the way of variety, like the shrines and quest rewards for instance, or structured things in such a way as the bulk of the payoff and decision making is rather backloaded. Given the RMA scheme, one can't help but reckon this is rather intentional to keep people playing, as the longer somebody plays to get to a groove of satisfaction the more likely they will at least "sample" the auction house and potentially get hooked as the potential revenue stream for it astounding considering the current sales figures that put it in the neighborhood of already 6 million+.
Given the massive dev period, and general literacy capabilities, Blizzard obviously had a pulse on the community clamor for all of these years and yet chose this model to adopt...perhaps with ample "suggestion" from the Activision side of things.
