Weird. Mostly I knew D2 as "that game my friends bot" while we do MtG drafts. I'll ask them about their intense character driven interactions.
This.
Most of the time you were not only botting, but if you were leveling, you didn't spend any points in skills, and banked all possible stat points until you hit your 80's, then you calc'd out the spec you thought you wanted, blew all your points and hoped your 6 hours of botting cow levels yielded a good build.
I ran a PC bang (80 computers) for a few years during the "glory" days of D2. I had a large amount of D2 players; let me tell you how a typical D2 day was spent, without any exaggeration:
Start bot - run for X hours to level something
Spend points, start bot again to farm pindle and the like
Dupe any item possible, trade for SOJ's
Sell SOJ's to black market to pay for dinner
Power level a friend who didn't want to bot in Cow levels for a few hours
Turn pindlebot back on, and go to bed.
After we would close for the day, the few of us that ran the shop would log all 80 computers into battle.net and run bots. This was how you played D2 if you were "hardcore". If you weren't you played it for maybe a month and moved on to something else. In those days, our #1 game was Counter-Strike, followed by Starcraft and then Everquest. Diablo 2 trailed EQ by a good margin.
I've never botted D3. I have a combined playtime in D3 of 776 hours. (Think I'll play 1 more hour to hit 777!). I would say I enjoyed most of that time, half of which was spent before paragon, simply kiting Siegebreaker runs for hours on end. The game isn't golden by any means, but it certainly has some entertainment value, and the changes they are making are for the most part, all positive. I think I legitimately played D2 a total of 200 hours. The rest was countless hours of botting to get the things I needed. I personally am glad for the direction they are taking the game. We'll see how much fun this expansion is or isn't - but isn't fun relative anyway? I will also add that I have WAY more attachment to my D3 characters than any single character I made (legitimately or otherwise) in D2.