Everyone that showed up on the ladder and tried to get on it...plenty of people cared.
For a lot of people D2 was constant competition, that's what you get with any kind of game and has absolutely nothing to do with WoW.
@thread :
I'm really glad they're working on making Inferno brutally hard and hope it'll be hard for everyone.
Diablo 2 was super easy and I really don't get the drama over iron maiden since you could avoid it completely by taking a few seconds dragging out the melee mobs and killing the casters with skills that don't do physical damage.
What I did with my barbarian : locate casters, leap to casters, berserk till they're dead, check if there are other casters around and whirlwind through melee mobs when there aren't any close enough and when you don't have iron maiden on you (duh). It took a little bit more time but it's very easy to do and didn't require awesome gear.
Ancients on hell were never an issue for me on any of my characters and I played with everything, I did however switched to my smiter to deal with ancients since that killed them in a few seconds.
Just be prepared for anything I guess