Make yellow and lower items interesting - here is a way:

In D2 (greatest Diablo, hands down), you could find a yellow item that you would use.
In D4, yellow and below are auto-trash. And for some, any orange without a GA is auto trash too.

Either give us a magical ability to auto-sell or auto-dismantle or make them more interesting.

An orange item rolls 3 magic properties.
Lets say it can roll +Strength [50-100] (I made it up, not sure what the real number is)

A yellow item rolls 2 magic properties.
I believe it can also roll +Strength [50-100] but maybe it’s lower.

What if it was higher?

What if Yellow rolled 25% higher (for example, change the % to whatever works)
So yellow could roll +Strength [62.5-125]

And what if Blue rolled 25% higher?
So blue could roll +Strength [75-150]

Fiddle with the 25% number until the change is sufficient to where a player would consider using a yellow or blue item (to max that key property that they are focused on).

The % can be different for different attributes. Maybe +Crit Chance should not rise as easily as +Strength.

Or just make it so that when you temper an ancestral yellow, your first category always rolls 2 of the affixes from the selected manual. Since a lot of the affixes on a manual aren’t as good, this would still be lower ceiling than legendary, but it would also be easier to hit the most important affix from a manual. For ancestral blues, have both categories add 2 affixes. Then you could even get whites into the party and have them add all the affixes from a manual.

Of course, you’d also have to let yellows and blues roll GAs and let blues and whites be imprinted.

You need a way to distinguish the interesting ones from the mass at a glance.

No one* wants to go back to reading though 33 items every 10 mins.

*there’s probably one

  1. Crafting system using Rares(yellows)
    and/or
  2. ‘Upgrade Rare’ - Recipe to upgrade a Rare item into a Legendary of the same type.
    Could make it cost 3-5x what the same item type costs at Curiosity Vendor - Obols(or whatever currency).

Item slot/type targeting using what are effectively useless items outside of salvage.

@OP - I like the idea of there being some chase & use for them but as this poster said…

Yup

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That’s easy enough. If the yellow has +Strength between 101-125 (for example) give it a star like the Greater Affix system.

Another thing I’d like to see if custom highlight - so if I put it into the system that I want an amulet with crit chance and cooldown reduction, the game gives any item like that a special glow or something so I don’t miss it.