I played Diablo from version 1.01 to version 1.10 and they really changed the game alot. Every patch seemed to nerf a popular class and make a different class uber powerful. This would piss you off it when your uber character was nerfed into oblivion but it also kept the game fun because it gave you new sub-classes to play.
I don't know if the game is better now or not. The only thing that kept me playing the game at patch 1.08 was the ease of item farming. 1.10 made the game harder and it was fun until the new wore off then it became tedious and lost all of it's replay value, to me anyways. I did everything there was to do in the game. I had multiple level 99s of every character, 1.10 just gave me incentive to quit
Battle.net was a great place but it seems hackers are more active than the server security now. I really hope you like the game, but I think you would have liked it ALOT more if you had picked it up a few years ago.