There was pretty broad consensus that D4 objectively had a lot of problems until recently, but a comment I saw soon after it was released about all the negative and middling reviews really struck me:

“The reason everyone’s frustrated is that they’ve outgrown Diablo and they don’t realize it.”

I'm going to disagree with this as a long-term ARPG fan and a long-since-washed-up game dev.

Up through the last few years, I was playing Path of Exile rather regularly. The grind in that game puts what we used to do in D2 to shame, to me at least.

(Comparing the amount of time I used to spend baal/cow/key/pindle running to gear a character sufficiently for e.g. ubers vs. what I'd consider equiv endgame bosses in POE from tree-boosted maven/Sirus/ubers/etc, outside of explicitly low-gear bossers like trapping)

I also regularly wish I could go _Back_ to playing it, specifically 1.13-1.15 (harvest) as it was, in my opinion, the peak of ARPG gameplay, as it turned progression from pure RNG where a wrong roll would brick an item or where you had to rely on the market to find your gear into something slightly less punishing where we could experiment with a far wider variety of builds. But the powers that be in POE saw it differently, that it watered down the endgame and made progression too easy, and proceeded to remove the vast bulk of the mechanic, while doubling down on other mechanics that were, frankly, not respectful of anyone's time. (e.g. scourge.)

This to say, I think game incentives have changed over the last few decades. Something subtle, motivated by microtransactions, subscriptions and streamers, has changed the nature of grind from primarily something that needs to be kept fun to make the game meaty enough to play, to something that must sufficiently extend gameplay to keep the microtransaction faucet going and keep certain goals effectively out of reach.

I can believe it.

I tried D3 pretty late, just before D4 came out.

The hack and slash gameplay was alright, but I found it such a burden to keep receiving a huge number of items that were rarely worth keeping, having to stop and get rid of those items repeatedly was a drag, particularly when I felt I had to look them all over carefully just in case one of them really was better.