What makes the item system so bad?

[Chesspiece_face]

Simplest solution is to make the affixes that aren't straight damage/defense/vit more powerful. Namely the CC affixes (change to slow, blind, freeze, stun, etc) the skill bonuses, and maybe things like movement speed as well.

I disagree. Making the CC affixes much more than a gimmick on items causes serious problems with balance. You very quickly get into Tornado-Wizard territory, where certain builds essentially become invincible because you can keep any enemy CC locked in perpetuity.

I suppose one way you could make these affixes work would be to remove them as they stand now and move the CC chance back onto the damage type on weapons (Holy - Blind, Fire - Stun, Poison - Slow, etc.) giving weapons with that damage a base chance to proc the effect. Then you can add in an affix on other items that can magnify the effect, thus still allowing people to try to build around it but not to the point where the CC effect would be all-encompassing as it was with Wizards.

As far as the item system in general I felt fairly disappointed with it until recently. I think the problem is that for 90% of a characters life-span you are making simple choices based on whether a new piece of gear has better numbers than the old piece. The last 10% of the character's growth is where the difficult/fun choices start coming into play. My present WD is trying to balance INT, VIT, All Resist, LoH, Health Regen, Crit, and Crit Damage, all while trying to maintain as much Pick-up Radius as I can possibly get my hands on. It is a super fun build and the item choices associated with it go pretty deep. Having said that, I'm sure that there are many builds that don't go that deep into the item well. It wasn't too long ago when every build out there only wanted massive Attack Speed and LoH. After that was balanced, Crit started to factor into people's choices. I think the best thing Blizzard can do for the item system is to keep building on the Legendary stable that they have while continuing to make more builds viable. When a build has to factor in more stats then they can reasonably expect to get on items (such as the WD I'm playing) you are forced to make interesting choices. And when you do get that one piece of gear that is perfect for your build it's that much more rewarding.