What might be the reason for the clunkiness, and I had a similar feeling when turning my character 180 with the turn rate animation they added is because there are extra frames of animation now. OG game was a 25fps 2d game with fairly discrete animations (few different frames, pretty “snappy”) whereas now it’s a 3d game with over twice the framerate and animations are continuous and with extra movement between the original frames. I think this was the wrong approach.
There is a technique for creating 3d animations that feel like 2d ones, it is used in fighting games like Guilty Gear Strive and Dragonball Fighterz. That technique is basically to manually draw, pose and illuminate 3d frames as if they were hand drawn 2d. The result, in those cases, is that it feels like you’re playing a 2d sprite-based fighting game with their characteristic “snappy” feel. I think they should have used that technique in D2. The gameplay itself, I feel like there is way less input lag which was something that made me quit the original game, but the animations do feel like they’re “slowing the game down” even though they aren’t. It’s something I can live with, but I 100% see the problem