I agree.. I'd like to see a game that for once, focuses more on unique equipment that stays with you through the course of the game, perhaps costs a little money to maintain or upgrade; and for good measure has a few variants that also provide different benefits within the equipment piece's particular performance range.
Less focus on picking crap up and selling it, and more focus on combat and plot advancement.. Most of the dungeon crawling in DD felt like a time-sink more than anything after a while, partly because you were just mindlessly killing things in huge areas, picking stuff up, selling it, and returning again to the same huge -bland- looking area. It does take a lot of work to make unique textures, and build unique levels, but maybe doing something like including sections of the game that generate random dungeons and / or quests for objects or cash, wouldn't be such a bad idea
