Great OT.
Can I ask, what was so hated about the game originally and what is different now?
Almost everything?
Higher level difficulties were broken beyond belief, locking you into specific builds which were boring as fuck for the most part. The loot was atrocious, since it was designed around the existence of the AH thus you played to gain money in order to buy better gear. No paragon levels in the first few months, so people had nothing to look forward after reaching Inferno or beating it. No pvp whatsoever while it was promised and grouping was an actual penalty over playing solo lol. The campaign itself garnering criticisms for it's writing and pacing.
Not that the campaign has changed, but people tolerate it these days since they know that adventure mode will be available in a little more than a week.
The biggest change is that arpg are repetitive by design, but the selling point is that you kill monsters to get loot and you never know when you are going to get something amazing. They brought back the addictiveness just by letting you kill monsters and get the loot, which is the basis of Diablo or any worthwhile loot arpg.
They rebalanced the classes so there's plenty of viable build, grouping is a nice bonus over playing solo and you can be part of a clan so it's more social. Reworking the difficulty levels is also a positive change in my book since you can and should find a nice balance between challenge and efficient gold/exp gain.
I think I've put more hours into the game since patch 2.0 than I did in the launch window lol.
My last achievement dated back to june 2012 so I went on a year and a half hiatus. o_o The game wasn't as bad as it's haters declared, but it wasn't very good either. I will probably put 50+ hours by next week to get a couple more paragon levels and getting another toon to 60.