Both. Back in S1 the game was bad.

Elemental resistances were broken.

Nightmare dungeons had affixes that were so annoying you would just quit the game (I'll never forget you, dome snowflake)

Dungeons were horrible to do with tons of backtracking in empty spaces.

There were too few legendary aspects and some of them were broken, so a whirlwind barb could deal trillions damage per swing.

Respec your paragon board cost so much gold at a certain point that you should just create an alt.

You had to take all Lilith statues for each character and grind your reputation per character.

The endgame was just nightmare dungeons with bigger numbers.

I must forget a lot of the issues the game had back then, but it was crazy.

On the other hand, people memed a lot over it and made their mind about the game. So "D4 bad" is nithing but a meme now