Sure, 50-60 hours of fun for 73 dollars (EU) is almost-OK.
Wow your currency sucks
Diablo 3 cost me less than half the price of Wing Commander 3 even in actual terms, let alone real terms
But, you are pretending that Blizzards plans for item monetization don't affect that phase of the game. They do:
Always online DRM, tightly controlled loot drops, no mods, "server maintenance", no character development other than item-equiping.
First three are the same as many other games out there, the latter I disagree with - you have to stop thinking of it as using exactly the same skill tree system that earlier games do. It's actually much more like Guild Wars, or LOTRO or other recent games that allow you to build a stack of abilities for a given session, only those abilities are very heavily customisable. It's different, but it's not inferior IMHO. And it has nothing to do with monetisation as there's absolutely no need to buy items.
To each his own - but this is what I was talking about: They have bent every single aspect of the game just to up the chance people will get just a slightly fed up with it and end up spending real coin.
You're welcome to your opinion - I agree that there are some (though not all) aspects which are focused on profit, but this is a good thing. They are a company, not a charity, and as long as playing the game is entirely optional then they would be irresponsible if they didn't aim to make a profit. Along the way however they're improving the player experience in several ways (while reducing it in others, less important to me). The choice is yours as to whether you prefer the new way or prefer the old way. If it helps make them profitable and thus ensures the viability of the PC gaming platform for AAA games then I'm all for it.
It could have been a better game, with no lag, no downtimes, rewarding item drops, character developement etc.
And it could be a console only game too
One more thing: The world should stop using the word "hard" to describe phases of a games requiring only time and/or money investments. There's nothing hard about farming. Anyone can do that.
Hard means: requiring high player skill, prior or during the described part of the game.
Multiplying the health of your creeps by 10 doesn't make the game hard - it makes you a bad game-designer.
Sure, but have you played Diablo 3? Unlike other games that just multiply the health of bad guys in harder modes, D3 gives you new bad guys, and gives them new abilities, that absolutely require you to up your player skill to survive. It's a very refreshing experience, and makes finally beating that battle after having to work out what skill loadout, what runes you'll apply, and what tactics you'll have to use to be effective, really quite fun.