You sound like someone who hasn't played D3 since its release
They put another guy in charge and fixed a ton of flaws with the game.
Kotick had absolutely nothing to do with the RMAH or D3 - that was purely the design team.
Blizzard makes more money than God for Activision - and Kotick is smart enough to understand that you should never interfere with a cash cow that good.
Personally, I think RMAH was the best thing about D3 and I hated to see it go, but that was for legal reasons. They made it sound like it was for the fans - but if you do a little research, it was obvious why they did it.
As for skills being the same - I very much disagree. As I said, I think D3 has the best skill variety of all the game in this genre.
They feel different and they have different effects and synergies. That said, D3 doesn't have useless skills like so many other RPGs, if that's what you mean. They actually wanted all skills to have their uses.
But that's a Blizzard thing - it's the same in all their games. They keep balancing until all choices can be viable - but they're never equally viable. That's bullshit.
But if you want to compete on the highest difficulty levels - you can't just pick random skill setups. You have to gear properly and pick the right combinations.
But I agree that PoE and GD both have much more complicated and interesting progression systems.
They're just boring as hell to actually play and look at - compared to D3.