i agree with all this and more. :^)

I liked the large sets of yore, sure they were hard to assemble, but they were fantastic once together. The idea of having a 9 piece set, but with bonuses increasing in power after every 2 or 3 pieces sounds great. I also like the idea of multiple sets. I had a lot of fun mixing and matching Arena, crafted, badge gear and drops in BC to optimize with the pieces I had.

When BC started up gear was simplified by dropping a lot of the fun procs that would appear, and at the same time most of your abilities' power was shifted from level progression into gear stats. In late BC the stat consolidation started making gearing simpler. Now after further consolidation very little of the gear looks distinctive, and everything has massive globs of 1 to 3 stats, and very few, if any, special procs or bonuses.

The game has always been heavily gear-based, but the gear has become more standard and boring... which I think has carried through into the game itself. Honestly it feels more like an ilvl quest than anything else. There is no more balancing or careful choices, if a piece of gear has a higher ilvl, it's better. It doesn't look very different, it doesn't perform very different.. it's just better. You get it, equip it, and then raid some more to get your next gob of ilvl.

I'd like gearing to have some nonstandard options rather than a great big neon flashing arrow saying 'hey, this thing is better, use this'. I still have a lot of fun in Diablo 2 using different weapons and other pieces to stack up certain effects. For instance I stacked up pieces of the Angelic set's jewelry to make a melee Sorceress that had a massive attack bonus. There is nowhere near that level of customability now. I recognize that making more items and effects makes the game harder to balance and longer to produce, but honestly, it's my dime, not theirs. For this reason and a fistful of others, I'm not paying Blizz to develop WoW any more, because frankly I don't like the way Blizz is developing it.

I didn't make the game gear-focused, Blizz did, but with a gear-focused game the least they can do is make the gear halfway interesting.