Now that we have a bit more information I feel like I can make a response to this:
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I think with Ascendency, and Atlas of Worlds, there was an attempt to create a game the appealed to both "casual" and "hardcore" players which is simply that there was some top end content that was for the hardcore people and casual people could do most of the other stuff. It didn't turn out too well, but they tried.
I agree it didn't turn out to well, because its almost impossible to create a balance that works well for mass appeal and for niche audience at the same time.
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Part of it is the powercreep that came with ascendency and the goal of keeping that part optional. If you adjust monster power to reflect the player power that they gain through ascending then it's not really optional. So it gave you a lot of power with not increase in monster danger. Atlas introduced higher level maps which did something, but the damage wasn't really from anything other than increasing player power.
Exactly, as we see so far in the 3.0 beta that GGG is willing to balance with AC points being factored in. Does it put more strain on the lab as a piece of content, sure but people are going to do it for the reward one way or another.
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Part of the problem is the existence of Vaal Pact, with the ability to output silly amounts of damage, and easy access to instant life leech you basically reduce the game to two states, fine, and dead. This leads to energy shield being the obviously best defense because it gets you bigger EHP pools all the time, but doesn't come with the drawback of said pool being harder to fill. Which also gets you the added bonus of rare armor pieces only having 3 good prefixes and 4 good suffixes instead of the usually 4 good prefixes and 5 good suffixes.
Clearly this is being addressed by removing the interaction with instant leech and es together.
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What I think killed your hardcore was a combination of the onslaught league, where GGG learned that people found faster monsters exciting, but for skill based game play in the game like this you need to incentivize positioning and tactics over gear checking monsters, and faster monsters with bigger packs makes that harder and harder until it's basically impossible. So the other option is making all of the precombat decisions like gearing and leveling, unfortunately it's 2017 and the internet is here to say so it's not to hard to find the best decisions there. So acquiring the gear maybe, but having also played when it was trade chat and forum posts, trading basically didn't happen so it made the rare items rare and hard to get. Once trading became not just awful well it boomed and with it came all the people who wanted to sell, but didn't hate themselves enough to deal with the forum, and the goods were plentiful.
But if more people are interacting, shouldn't the consideration of increasing the supply also be something that is considered? Perhaps we have too many drops (in terms of things too common) and not enough investment into characters.
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I think part of that is simple itemisation, uniques are best in slot far too much which makes decisions simple and uniform, and rares don't do enough to make that decision very tough at all. There's only a handful of mods you want on any rare piece of gear and how good an item is is just based on the number on those mods, but there's rarely a choice between two mods, it's just how expensive a piece of the same gear you can get.
I think its a bit more complicated then that. Certain slots will always have contenders, like shields and chest, but rares dominate some of the other slots in a good number of builds.
