A few ideas of how to save D3

[smegged]

3) If you use the auction house, you end up using it for almost every single item you end up wearing. Your character feels like you could have just bought it off ebay.
4) If you don't use the auction house, you are crippling yourself and your progression. You farm not for gear, but for salebait.

Only if you choose to skip ahead, because you really really badly want to see higher act Inferno now and don't want to put the time into farming and crafting earlier acts to enable to get your character to get up there. It's your choice to use the auction house to circumvent the process that by plan was supposed to take months. Otherwise, you can slowly build up your gear over time and make incremental forays into the next area of an act as your gear and playing skills improve.

What's funny is that it seems that most people are buying the wrong gear -- stuff that's glass cannon +mf% type gear that would be highly desired in D2. So, they die over and over again, even though they spent millions of gold on the AH to get it.

But that's just it, the game has been designed in such a way that you *won't* get stuff drop that's good for your character. It's balanced around you picking up stuff off the AH. Blizzard don't consider it min/maxing to be buying off the AH. They consider it to be a required part of play. They made it that way on purpose so that people will use the RMAH and give them a revenue stream.

Why else do you think it only takes 60 odd hours for a non-twinked character to hit level 60 and beat hell difficulty?

Diablo 3 has a late-game centred around itemising your character. The auctionhouse is Blizzard's way of controlling and monetising the flow of items. The problem is that unlike in diablo 2, the late-game offers little else other than gearing up. There are no perma-bonuses to completing certain quests. There is no long slog levelling from 80+. The slow trickle of rewards, the multiple build paths and intentionally misbuilt characters that give diablo 2 the addictiveness it has is gone. Now all that's left is the required itemisation and farming. It's like WoW, but without raiding in the endgame. WoW without the coordination of teams of 25.

The leveling game is fun, but none of the level 60+ players I've talked to in real life like the game after they hit 60. They either reroll or quit.