OK. So, like I said, I've ascended four times (Wiz, Val, Rog, Tou). And don't get me wrong--NetHack is certainly not a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's limited, and those limits are closer to the player than I think many fans would like to admit. And those limitations are total fun-killers; they kind of show you the "man behind the curtain," so to speak, and hurt the desire to keep playing.

There comes a point, and it's not that far into the game, where you have essentially won barring an extreme combination of events. Once you've gotten reflection, magic resistance, and MC3 (so just after Sokoban, for a wizard), enemies that focus on status attacks more than damage are pretty toothly. Sleep resistance (elves, either being or eating) removes one of the bigger threats remaining in the early game, and you should run into enough elves to chow your way into sleep resistance well before clearing the mines. The absolute latest you'll get reflection and/or magic resistance is the Castle, and I don't remember a game where I got to DLV 11 without reflection or magic resistance.

So what do you have once you've got reflection, magic resistance, and sleep resistance? You've got a very grindy set of levels leading to a very grindy Quest leading to an eternally grindy and completely uninteresting Gehennom; even Fort Ludios is really only there to give your get key a workout when half of them kill each other with a wand of death and when you hack your way through the rest of them. Rarely are there interesting tactical choices, and wall-to-wall monsters does not interesting gameplay make.

The game again becomes somewhat interesting once you've got the Amulet and are on the way back up. But this is after multiple hours of what amounts to very little actually happening, and many chances for losing the game in ways that amount to nothing more than frustration. Success in NetHack is not the result of ingenious play, but rather just not doing a relatively constrained number of stupid things and not having a string of random rolls go against you. It is the epitome of the Luck-Based Mission. (And let's surely not conflate douchey random happenings with tactically interesting situations or difficulty; losing a character because you're blinded and bump into a cockatrice is not interesting or difficult, it's stupid and absolutely exemplifies meanspirited game design. It's the video game equivalent of the asshole pen-and-paper GM who's looking for reasons to kill the players. Uncool.)

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A great comparison to NetHack, in terms of flavor but doing quite a lot of things very right, are the Diablo games. The wide array of skills and spells result in legitimately interesting long-term choices and a number of different ways to deploy them creates tactical challenges that you don't see in NetHack (but, as it happens, do see in other Roguelikes; I'm personally waiting for Doryen because jice, while a bit of a jerk, has some fantastic ideas that I'd love to see realized). Even things such as items are more dynamic and interesting, with random properties applied to different weapons. The static nature of NetHack weapons results in everyone specializing in long sword or saber if they can get it, because of Grayswandir and Frost Brand--welp, how would the game feel differently if Frost Brand was a two-handed sword in some games? (Answer: not too differently, they'd just not use it because the two-handed sword is balanced poorly. But what if it was a scimitar?)

Yes, NetHack came before Diablo, and surely influenced it in some ways. But NetHack has to be evaluated compared to what exists today, not what exists when it came out. And it does not stack up, even within its own genre. And what you really have, at the end of the day, is a game where almost every playthrough is the same regardless of class or race and there really are "right answers" for most of the potential character creation decisions that might pop up. I don't think you could get me to sit down and grind out another game today, because there are more dynamic, more responsive, more continually interesting games out there on which I can spend my time. NetHack, though, is basically solved. And I don't think a great game is solvable.