Your opinion is totally valid. I've been feeling this for the last couple of days while playing S3 and just generally having a good time. Everyone liked the Blood Harvest mechanic in S2, so they took elements from it and added them to many different parts of the overworld. But now people hate this, because it isn't contained within a specific zone with special mob density + item drop multipliers like Blood Harvest was.

IMO, Blizzard significantly improved on a core part of the classic Diablo game loop this season: traversing the overworld to get to an instanced dungeon or quest. In S2 and prior, there was no progression reason to engage mobs in the overworld. It was the worst XP, worst item drops, nothing much going on. You would just run your horse to the marker as quickly as possible. Now there are more kinds of mobs, more elites + elite packs, boss spawners, normal gameplay just wandering around is much more varied. And people are calling it 'a huge step back'.

I think they did make the pet pretty lame. If they were constrained to only doing a few actives, they should've at least made the augmentations good, not lame shit like 'do x% skill damage as lightning damage' for each element.

It's very difficult to make sense of how people feel about this game though when many of the specific criticisms seem poorly reasoned. I have to assume a lot of the bad sentiment online over the last couple of days carries a vestige of disappointment about things we already knew: no itemization overhaul, and the same endgame unique grind from S2 bar a weekly challenge dungeon that isn't out until season 3.5. But holy shit, they just added hours of high-quality content to the game for free and it's completely drowned out by these people that can't stop complaining, even in in-game trade chat.