To me tetris and chess are good games because they use a few rules and allow the player to use them to the fullest. The strength of the player is based more on foresight and skill at using the few rules. I don’t think D2 has the same strength, since it feels like they kept adding more features as they developed the game rather than refine the ones already in place.
An example is with the sockets, we have gems, jewels and runes. Now the gems have their effect duplicated with both runes and jewels, which seems to obsolete them (I imagine a D2 player can point out several instances where all 3 are used in tandem). In order to remove this obsolete aspect of the game, I could get rid of runes… by allowing the jewels to have the same affixes of the runes, then I don’t need the runes on an individual basis. In order to remove the runeword aspect, I could use different colours and sizes of gems for the same function… that is I could have a runeword combination of “chipped skull, perfect diamond” to create a unique helm. there are 50ish runes compared to 5 sizes of gem and 7 (i think) different colours giving 35 different gems to use… that should be enough for the 100 or so runewords in game. To me, the fact that I can keep all the benefits of runes (individual affixes and runewords) whilst being able to remove runes themselves shows a lack of refinement within the game itself.