Of course I'm only talking about my personal experiences and opinions.
Actually I think the "deep character building" trend is what led to the endless ripoffs of crap loot-fests like Diablo that we still see pumped out today. Say someone plays a CRPG. Once he's played through it, how many more times does he really want to go through the same story with different characters, just to try out builds?
The Diablo games took the notion of character-builds and skill-trees and made the game almost ALL about that. The story is almost besides the point. It's all about trying different builds, planning for them, discussing builds on forums, etc. The only things getting you through the same random dungeons are the character build you're trying out, and of course, random loot drops.
Older versions of D&D had much more rudimentary character building systems and relied far more on a story and role playing to provide the fun.
This is all just my opinion though, and I am not trying to convince you otherwise.