Yeah, to me that's called "Dumbing stuff down."
Because if they cared so much about everyone picking the same attribute, they could have also made the other attributes more interesting to pick, and keep the old system.
In general, I'm all for more choice in games, but only if the choices are meaningful. Diablo II had a system that didn't really have meaningful choices, so they removed it. Yes, another option would have been to try and make the other attributes more useful to pick, but I don't see how they'd accomplish that easily. I suspect they thought they'd done that for II. Barring that, removing what was effectively pointless choices seems like a smart call - as long as they continue to have other meaningful choices in the game.
Calling it "dumbing down" just seems silly, as there was nothing "smart" about it before.
I like how when this happened in Mass Effect 2, everyone and their mom called it "Dumbing down", but when it happens in Diablo it "just makes sense!"
Well, I never commented about any "dumbing down" in Mass Effect 2, so that doesn't seem to apply to me. But even if I had, I'm not sure of the relevance. Just because something seemed like a bad call on an RPG doesn't mean it's going to be a bad call on an action game. And that's even assuming that the cases were identical, which they aren't.
If the variety and choices of character building aren't there for DIII, then I'll be among the first to knock Blizzard for it, but just because they've switched the way they go about their variety doesn't mean it doesn't exist.