Hear hear. I shall forever lament the passing of Westwood.

I still think Warcraft 3 has one of the best single-player experience out there. The story, characters, gameplay, its better than most other games (even RPGs, which tend to focus on story and characters) and its an RTS. Then theres the great multiplayer, battle.net is "easy to handle", the map editor is amazing (and so are custom games online), lots of people still playing etc.

about the c&c thing, i just felt, in my personal opinion, that generals had deeper gameplay and had more varied strategies.

war 3 felt like.. mass troops and destroy. in generals, even a few can destroy a lot, if used correctly.

many times i've played war 3, using strategy and guile and whatnot, but in the end everything seemed to come down to mass troops.

Thats not true at all. Heroes have a big role and theres a lot of micromanagement to do. Try playing those custom games "micro wars" where players have same/similar group of troops and you face each other. Some are going to own you.

i agree that there's a lot of micro to do, and winning depends on your ability to do it, but to win, you still need a mass of troops.

in generals, i could ride my air force all the way to kingdom come. i could produce just 4 stealth bombers and beat an enemy with dozens of tanks. strategic attack seemed to be more involved in victory that numbers.

I'd say addictive gameplay. I still play Starcraft and DOTA here and then these days. It's just really addictive. That's what makes Blizzard games so unique. And of course I'm looking forward to playing Starcraft II next year.

Warcraft 3 TFT easily makes my Top 10 games of all time list. It caters for everybody. There's a deep story there for you to explore if you want (most people don't).
Multiplayer is the winner here though. There are servers for practically everywhere.
Battle.net is a VERY well designed system. Friend lists, ban lists, chat channels, tournaments, ladders, etc.etc.
Dota is extremely addictive, i played for 3 years before i finally bought a 360 and got off it. The strategy in both Dota and Warcraft 3 are extremely deep. You need to play for a long time (2-3 years) to actually learn half the things in it. But if you don't want to be that good you can always just do 4v4 and everyone just masses and you can still have a load of fun. For those hardcore RTS fans 1v1 actually requires A LOT of experience if you want to beat actual good players. There's also the replay system to save cool moments and learn from mistakes. There is the World Editor (like Forge) to make new maps and mods (anything is possible, just think of it and there will be a map). But most importantly you can acquire it for FREE pretty easily now.

Because they offer the best single player experiences + great multiplayer experiences.

Games are not "technically good", they are either entertaining, or not.  You might collect a list of features, that make it more entertaining for you, and the overall audience might agree with you, or not. In this case, not. 

the only blizzard games I really played are starcraft and Diablo 2......but I played the crap outta them both, they really are among the most polished games I ever played.

I can kill the boss in Diablo 2 over and over and over just to get an unique item so i can trade it for a rune then use the rune word to create another unique item then build a new character whose skills are complemented by the item then use this character kill bosses over and over and over for another rare goodie...... I don't play MMORPGs for a reason, I already fully experienced the first ( and maybe the best ) of them years ago.

And for Starcraft, you can learn how to play it in a couple of hours, but if you want to MASTER it you have to take it as a full time job, thats why it's the national sport of South Korea, enough said.