My point with Revenge was that it's arguably a Barbarian's best skill. If D3 played like D2, barbarian's would just mass enemies up, not use a single other ability, and just RevengeRevengeRevengeRevengeRevengeRevengeRevengeRevengeRevenge until everything around him died. To me, that is a huge step backwards.
WoW is where it is because it has some good ideas (though most of them are hardly exclusive to WoW), arbitrarily complaining about ideas that have permeated into D3 simply because they exist in another game is just looking for something to complain about. Hell, WoW is what it is because a lot of D2 ideas filtered into it: random loot, multiple distinct rarity classes, uniques -> epics, three trees of tiered skills per class, safe-zone towns, "obtain item" endgame, "boss farming" -> "weekly raids".
What makes zero seconds so much better than thirty? It's not balanced, it's not fun, and it's not difficult. It's just yet another spam mechanic (which D2 was chock full of) and, for me, it's boring and poorly thought out.
I think drops may have seemed better relatively, but I think it's essentially just because people held different vantage points in D2 and D3. People in D3 feel like they never get upgrades/good items because the bar is set so high because the Auction House is not only a market, but also a gallery. People see the exceptional items there and they set the bar for what's "good" extremely high, even in terms of what they think they need for Inferno; when in actuality, the best gear available is substantially overgeared even for Inferno. In D2, you had no such gallery; for the most part gear quality was determined relative to what you yourself found because that made up the majority of what you saw. As such, you never really had the expectation (or need, given D2's difficulty) for the 'best' gear [not because it didn't exist, but because you rarely saw it] which made drops seem relatively better. If you didn't know an Archon piece could have 200 Str, 200 Vit, 80 AR, 10% Life and +400 armor, then the piece you found with 80 Str, 80 Vit, and 40 AR looks a whole lot better. Not to mention, because D2 had no true "Inferno" level, gear requirements were simply less demanding, so in a way it just didn't matter as much either.
Building was shallow at it's best. Skills were dictated by synergies and stat points dictated by the gear you wanted to wear. Damage as a result of Str and Dex were almost completely negligible (if you were to gimp for 500 Str, it would only be as powerful as a +50% damage mod on a weapon in the best scenario, which is pretty minor when good weapons had +250% to 400% damage generally). Energy was pointless given how easily you could recover mana with potion or TP spam, leaving you pretty much with Vitality being the only decent stat. The only outlier I remember being shield wearers who want to block, but again that's simply "Invest X in Dex, dump Y in Vit".
I think it feels like an evolution of D2 and I think recollections of D2 are strongly tinted by nostalgia. It improves on a lot of the annoyances and drawbacks of D2; muling, inventory management, run repetition, "I Win" button spam, utter lack of difficulty, no charms (god were they stupid lol), and ultimately the dis-engaging gameplay.