He asked how it's different, not whether you find those differences enjoyable or not. A lot of your points seem overly dismissive and contrarian and I felt compelled to respond.

Specific rewards, as in, not obtainable outside the rift and rift completion time etc. is taken into consideration when upgrading them. Thus, 'specific rewards' that are literally based around your rift progression.

Leaderboards keep the game popular with streamers and as the game dies, they won't be so unobtainable, especially in hardcore. More is more, there's no reason to not want them.

Just because it's not popular to spam an event rift doesn't mean its not cool as fuck and fun for them to be in the game. Again, more is more.

The tilesets and mobs are randomised to a certain extent and yeah, they can be huge. Especially compared to Grim Dawn's crucible map which is more of an arena. I don't know how quoting speed run times for maps is relevant to map size especially compared to how slow you move in Grim Dawn comparatively.

Hand crafted boss battles with attacks and abilities that can be telegraphed and planned for. Uniquely named and designed. I don't see how describing how an overpowered build can dispatch them quickly diminishes the fact that they are in the game.

I mean separation from the main game in that I can't just host a game and jump from doing a crucible to playing on the normal game map without restarting everything. No one plays in story mode after they beat it a few times in D3... and we're talking about end game here so I don't know why you would argue that point.

The rest of your points are based around late end-game content that you are not pleased with even though it's in D3 but not Grim Dawn. Just because you've soaked hundreds of hours into D3 end game and got bored with it doesn't mean you can simply discount the huge differences between Rifts and the Crucible.