Diablo 4s progression is awful and it gets worse as you get further into the game. If you want to list an arpg, you should choose one of the path of exile games for at least grim dawn and last epoch. I also love Hades and especially Hollow Knight but I wouldn't really consider either of them to have amazing progression systems. Hollow Knight has real bad pacing issues when it comes to progression, and Hades slows down quite a bit once you get far enough into it. You start to get upgrades that don't really feel that meaningful because it takes a lot of currency to get to the big upgrades at that point.
The original BG 1&2 came on multiple CDs. Bg3 came on 4 CDs for the Xbox too. If in buying a physical game, I want the entire release copy of the game, even if it requires that they give me 30 discs. Hell, publishers should look into putting games on sdcards, in which case, it would be easy to package these large games. The gaming industry is getting closer and closer to a collapse, and these types of practices are leading the way for that. Frankly, I want it to collapse because these AAA studios are just trash. Indie studios have been upstaging these huge companies for years now, it's time for the AAA game to die.
What about trails through daybreak where it mixed action combat with turnbased combat so that you could kill easy mobs with the action combat and harder mobs with turn based strategy? Bravely default and octopath traveler let you use multiple turns at once, Shadow heart had the judgment ring system, suikoden had combos, ff13 had the atb system, eternal sonata has reflex guarding, megaten, saga Scarlett and Valkyrie profile etc I can think of at least 20 more games that should be on this list...
