You're right, the goodwill has been eroding for this lifelong fan. I adored Starcraft: Brood War, it was great to play online even over dial-up and relatively well balanced (though looking back I think that was mostly by accident) and as you say it had a great mod scene when you wanted to take a break from serious competition.
I didn't particularly like the shift to heroes, creeps, and semi-3D in Warcraft 3, but that's a personal opinion.
Then they hit me with Diablo 3 -> Starcraft 2 -> Hearthstone. Diablo 3's faults are well documented, it's apparently in a good place now but that ship has sailed for me. Starcraft 2 just didn't feel good to play for me. The snappy control and clean sprites of SC:BW was replaced with muddy 3D visuals and slow turning 3D models. And Hearthstone was fun, but they dialed up the RNG to entice casual players and make streams exciting. It got annoying to keep rolling the dice - both when opening packs and in the game (Dr Boom anyone?).
It took a while but eventually I realised their spark and magic was gone. They're just another AAA developer that I mostly ignore now.
I experienced the loss of that "spark and magic" in games twice in my lifetime.
The first time with Japanese console games, sometime during the PlayStation/2 era. There was something of a golden age on the way to mastery of 2D in the 1990's. I'm talking about the craftsmanship, the attention to minute details, the cognitive approach in designing difficulty and progression and outright "fun" games playing on our senses etc. The ingenuosity of some RPG systems, etc.
All that gradually took a back-seat as 3D was emphasizing visuals and "shiny" replaced "smart", "realistic" replaced "immersive".
The second time was with Blizzard, in very comparable ways — when you go back to the basics, how characters move and behave, how actually fun it is to press a button over and over, etc. Things that make some games absolutely stellar and others garbage and you just can't know until you try your hands on it for some time.
Needless to say I don't bother with most AAA today. (not that I game a lot if at all)
Yes the shift to 3D was absolutely a mixed bag. It is simply so much more work to make a 3D world, from level design to art. It enables some genres and games to exist (something like Monster Hunter: World just wouldn't be the same, and while Dark Souls is similar to Zelda and Metroid it also gains a lot from 3D) but it just diverts so many resources.
A common complaint about the open world trend is that environments feel bland, sparse, and copy-pasted. There is a lack of that hand-crafted attention to detail you mention when compared to something like Hollow Knight with beautiful backgrounds and precise control.
Oh totally agreed on the diversion of resources, and even before the machine (skills hired, teams divisions etc).
However open worlds, imho, pose challenges but not to the extent that it explains or excuses the lack of 'basic' low-level (physiological almost) engagement. It's a different problem I think, e.g. consider the 'blandness' of a typical NES or early PC world, and yet how engaging some titles managed to be. That's what I'm talking about. Sure, visuals help immersion (so a great open world may help, a bland one may deter), but this is at another, higher level than controls.
For instance, even in 3D, I remember having more fun "farming" in old-school ugly MMOs — up to and including WoW 1.x — than in later very "rich" worlds. The problem is so basic: for instance, visual feedback not perfectly timed to provoke "satisfaction" or a "reward" feeling, but rather feels frustrating and/or working against me (the worst feeling ever in a game, when the part that's yours — e.g. feedback, hitpoints — seems rigged or not fair or simply deceitful / obfuscated).
I remember reading Square Enix devs for FFXIV that "yes, boss X is essentially 'cheating' but that's because hollywood experience! better this way!"... — err, no, sorry, not ever was a game better because your opponent is visibly unfair — hasn't anyone learned from Metal Gear. This was the day I knew I just couldn't keep playing the game, it would never be satisfying to me because of its design philosophy.
As a friend in game dev at Capcom explained to me once, player controls is a very tedious work of finding the "ideal" timing windows and key combinations / orders that just make it "fun", subjectively. It's a lot of back-and-forth between code and testing some alpha — hundreds of times over a typical day. It's almost biological in nature, like good music. And stupid loads of time + great tooling are paramount to do this job well — one reason PlayStation SDKs are so appreciated in the industry ever since day 1, 1994; a polar opposite to Nintendo's for instance (I hear they got better, but look no further to explain 'lack of third-party support' on many of their platforms).
Controls may be "precise" but above all need to be predictable, learnable — like Sonic has always been 'sloppy', unlike Mario, but this ties in well with his speed (hence inertia) and persona (go-getter), and it's a small learning curve for players, but one that sets 'experienced' players appart. A great "sloppy" implementation, nonetheless precise mathematically.
I definitely have to check out Hollow Knight, though!
Sorry for a long piece, it's one of my 'truths' in game 'quality'. Note that this is all good advice to design UI in general for any kind of software — especially the timing of action, feedback, effect on events. There's a way — through testing — to make it all just 'flow' 'naturally' and with a weirdly 'satisfying' feeling.
Yes game feel is hard to quantify sometimes. There have been games that on paper I should adore, but in practice I struggled to enjoy. Bastion and Hyper Light Drifter are two - beautiful presentation, but the controls and gameplay feel just didn't click for me personally.
I play FFXIV and I'm not sure what the quote is referring to but in general I think it has a very good feel. They made a conscious choice to decouple animations from hits, meaning they can go nuts with extensive and flashy animations but your job is to just not be in the ground AOE marker when it vanishes - if you didn't get out in time you are hit, regardless of how long the following animation takes or whether you've walked a few steps since. This has a learning curve and confuses new players so should be explained better, but it makes for snappier gameplay and tighter movement patterns at the higher skill levels once you get it. Top raids are very much a dance of positioning, movement, and maximising uptime, which I enjoy a lot.
To the contrary (referring to ugly old MMOs) I also enjoyed FFXI and that was anything but quick and precise, the battle log itself was delayed and sluggish and abilities only came out every few minutes if you weren't a caster. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was that feeling of overcoming a challenge in a group (or the challenge of just finding a group!) and the ability to break the rules by beating enemies with 2 skilled people instead of a full group. I revisited it recently and still mostly enjoyed it, so it's not just a case of it being the best we could do back then.
I didn't particularly like the shift to heroes, creeps, and semi-3D in Warcraft 3, but that's a personal opinion.
Then they hit me with Diablo 3 -> Starcraft 2 -> Hearthstone. Diablo 3's faults are well documented, it's apparently in a good place now but that ship has sailed for me. Starcraft 2 just didn't feel good to play for me. The snappy control and clean sprites of SC:BW was replaced with muddy 3D visuals and slow turning 3D models. And Hearthstone was fun, but they dialed up the RNG to entice casual players and make streams exciting. It got annoying to keep rolling the dice - both when opening packs and in the game (Dr Boom anyone?).
It took a while but eventually I realised their spark and magic was gone. They're just another AAA developer that I mostly ignore now.