I don’t mean to be contentious but that sounds very different from the D2 I remember. I’ve played hundreds of hours of D2 and LoD through various patches up until 1.10 and playing an untwinked character, there are often times when you have to change out lower level uniques for blue or even white items in order to maintain viable base stats. In preparing for nightmare, white 3-socketed ancient armor was a good way to boost resists. There were a bunch of semi-useless uniques / set iems too that just weren’t as good as a socketed white or blue by the time you often found them.
It is also depended on what your character needs. Sometimes it was better to have a blue that just gave you a ton of resist over a bunch of other lesser stats.
If you got one the better uniques, then that generally rivaled everything but it usually took a ton of farming in the mid to late nightmare / hell to deck yourself out like that.
So, while you give D2 as an example of what you want to see, we’ve actually undertaken these balancing changes partly to bring loot closer to what I enjoyed and thought worked well in D2.