Rickt-click context sensitivity came with Warcraft 2. Command groups weren’t initally in Warcraft 2. They were later patched in with the Battle.net Edition. Still earlier than Starcraft.

Waypoints seem to be the only true innovation but they were also present in other RTS as well. One game that stands out was Dark Reign. It came out a year before StarCraft and introduced a lot of interesting UI and gameplay concepts: building queues, waypoints, customizeable unit AI, terrain height, etc…

It’s interesting that you recall the UI as being painful. Of course, compared to all the advancements in SC2, the original seems archaic, but I remember playing it for the first time and it felt so much less restrictive, so much more amazing and powerful ( up to this point the only RTS games I had been exposed to were the *Craft games, so I might not’ve known about some UI features from other games).

You could select up to 12 units! That beat whatever number was in WarCraft II (and definitely the 4 from WarCraft). The right-click context sensitivity was a godsend; it was a pleasure to have. I don’t remember whether War2 had things like building waypoints or control-groups, as those are things that sort of stand out in SC to me.

As for Diablo 3 – yeah you’re right. And there is stuff like Blackspore too. On the other hand some of the guys from the Diablo team split off to make an apparently quite good Diablo clone called Torchlight. Guess what, that one’s digital delivery only. Blizzard themselves are expanding their digital delivery infrastructure. Have you seen their on-line user interface when you install a game? It won’t be long now.