I loathed DS1 and I believe your statement is fully understandable and unfortunally caused a good game to fail. This is a shame, because DS2 was everything DS1 should have been. DS2 adds a fleshed out world (a heavy journal), real quests, real story, a lot of side content, NPC's to interact and have dialogue with, subquests, companion subquests (and pretty well written companions for this kind of game), a less linear experience etc. That way DS2 is more in the line what I would demand from a CRPG these days, where DS1 was simply diablo-with-a-party to me.
I think the reason for DS2's failure was because those who would enjoy it were turned off by DS1, and those who wanted another DS1 didn't find it in DS2. Maybe this is why the reason the DS2 expansion wen't back to the DS1 formula which like JuliusMagnus said undid the improvements DS2 did. Still, DS2 is one of the more enjoyable partybased RPG's out there. I would include it with games like Arcanum and Divine Divinity as those random odd titles people who are looking for more RPG's to play should check out.