Woof, it looks like you're right:
What You Can Expect from Diablo IV’s Post-Launch Experiences
I guess that means that, once I finish the story, I get a lot of my free time back, if seasons are just going to be some new drops and a single new boss fight.
Yeah the expectation further before launch, that the devs encouraged even after the bit you link, was that they'd be doing Path of Exile-style seasons, which are pretty major things, often involving adding sizeable chunks of content (some of which is retained in the longer-term), with usually multiple skills/supports (equivalent to like, a couple of new skills for each class in D4 terms), and often a whole bunch of new loot (far more than D4 is adding per season).
Now it appears we're looking at something that's more like Diablo Immortal or later Diablo 3, and they'd specifically said they were doing more than that.
To be fair, one of the devs who left towards the end of D4's development did say "Blizzard's content pipeline for D4 is troubled and they likely won't be able to deliver much for at least a year after launch" or something to that effect, but no-one was sure how serious they were.
Right now it's distinctly inferior to D3 once you've finished the story (which is a lot better than D3), in everything except graphics/sound/responsiveness. The loot is less interesting and way more annoying to obtain and maintain, the gameplay is infinitely clunkier and abilities less fun to use (generally speaking - especially as a lot of cool ones ate huge nerfs), the game is arguably more repetitive, and even if not, certainly more boring in the
way it repeats. Particularly damningly, the endgame progression (Paragon) isn't even really half-baked, it presents like a system very far in Early Access with non-finalized art, designs, and so on, that needs testing and revision but Blizzard seem to treating it as if it's final! I don't think we've seen a single major revision to the Paragon boards. I can only assume either Blizzard have already given up on them and are developing a new system, or, much worse, they think they're fine.
It's genuinely sad because it is in many ways a very well-put together game. In terms of art style, animation, sound, responsiveness, performance on lower end machines and so on, it handily beats, for example, Path of Exile (less so PoE2 to judge from demos). It's also more accessible than Path of Exile. But if you played each regularly but not obsessively for a couple of months, with D4 you'd likely be bored to tears, whereas with PoE, you'd still be having fun and finding stuff out, and have a wild variety of stuff you'd barely touched.
My guess is that the persistent rumours that they took a very sharp change in direction about 12-18 months ago are correct, and basically this 5 years of art/sound/story/tech etc. with 18 months or less of game design.
