All my characters are still in normal and it seems as though most of the character customization is going to be occurring in inferno. I'm still playing around with skills, trying to see what stats make them better (most are obvious but not all) and which skill work well together. Plus, I've only scratched the surface of hardcore.
Patches... Blizzard was up to 1.07 within a year of D2's release and is up to what now... 13? 14? When the game has as much variety of skills, items and characters, you could spend forever trying to get the balance right... And you will still not have it. There comes a time when you have to release it and then either continue to make it better or not. Most games of this genre get little to no support after release and always end up with wildly un-balanced stuff/bugs in it that never gets fixed. At least Blizzard keeps working on it.
They are definitely doing a shit job of handling people that have problems, they always have. Anything they do not feel like talking about simply gets deleted. I guess thats OK if they don't want posts that are just rants about much they suck but when D3 was released and it screwed Vista people, simply deleting everything with the word 'Vista' in it is stupid. I know when I went there to see if there was a fix and saw them all disappearing, I did not even bother to post.
I expect at loads of server side tweaks to the game and at least two more patches before the expansion and another two in the first few months after the expansion. I don't know... As long as future patches stop resetting my play/display options, they don't bother me. I still think I'll be playing this for a long time.