I should mention the 6 mil is low partly because I only play Hardcore (with a single softcore 60 to test stuff).

Also, it's not that people like me do not want to put in time to farm. it's that people NO LONGER HAVE THE TIME to put towards farming. I barely put in 20 minutes towards EE everyday now, compared to the 5 hours 10 years ago.

You have to remember that the crowd that played D1 and D2 are now 10 years older. Teens are now in their 20s-30s, most of us have jobs. So that begs the question, was D3 created to attract the young crowd (the current teens with tons of time), or to attract back the older players that played the original 2 games?

When making a game, you need to have a target audience and demographic in mind. Blizzard fluffed up big time here.

I do NOT want to spend 100 hours farming Act 1 just to progress to Act 2. Then I do NOT want to spend 100 hours to farm Act 2 just to go Act 3. That's not fun, that's just pure grinding. That 200 hours would take me 2 real live months at even 3 hours a day. Blizzard considered and posted this to be their end-game. They are mistaken, what people found fun in D2 wasn't JUST the loot, it was also the enjoyment of experimenting with different weird builds and simply facerolling the enemies.

People enjoyed therycrafting on Arreat Summit (you know what that is right?), to shave of a few seconds off each Mephisto or Baal run. People tried to do really hard things like Ironman mode, or Javazons or Melee Sorcs. You could do none of these in D3.

In D3, once you reached level 60, the only way to progress is through gear - AH offering the path of lower resistance. It removed/lowered the sense of progression/achievement. Efforts are aimed towards farming gold to buy items, rather than farming items. In D2, you had 2 ways to progress - both gear AND leveling up - which gave you another skill point and 5 stat points. Even if you didn't get gear upgrades, you still got more powerful, people look forward to that. There's a 5% exp loss on death in D2 (10% if you don't corpse run), but that's because dying is actually pretty hard in D2, it made you feel powerful. Inferno in D3 is just cheap 1-2-shots, especially if you aren't a monk/barb. Consider also that gear in softcore is practically worthless unless it has All-Resists on it, plus your primary stat, there's no gear variety.

D3 is a disaster, not as bad as FF14 became, but still a disaster. We're all just waiting for Guild Wars 2.