I preferred the aesthetics in D1

I said graphics, lol, not design.

Wym d2 has worse storytelling? Aside from the taken king and house of wolfs there was no interesting stories in the main gameplay of d1

That's true, but in D2 there are no interesting stories so far. Everything is buried in lore triumphs and after 2 years I am SICK of Ana Bray and Zavala's "I'm a grown woman now, dad, I can do what I want" act (which is the prevailing thing every time Rasputin is involved now). Forsaken leaned on Cayde's death but was really, really short with no real build up to anything. Beyond Light might be better, but it's a "I'll have to see it to believe it" thing since this company can't write stories anymore. The whole Osiris dlc had promise but, again, it was too short with nothing really going on until the last 3 or so missions. Taken King, on the other hand, felt like it changed the whole game and everything was different the whole time. There were so many side quests and extra missions that branched out from it to give it a more full feel even if the campaign portion of it was also short. Iron Lords dlc was the same way, everything after the campaign fed into the experience. By contrast, look at shadowkeep. There were some grind activities after the campaign but virtually no side quests and stories that fed back into it. We've gone what, 3 seasons since then, and not one of them have had anything to do with shadowkeep. It's shallow, empty, and outside of grinding nightmares or alters of sorrow, NOBODY goes to the moon. D2 has this penchant for giving us these awesome environments and ideas for stories, then tells them way too fast and abandons the environments/stories for new ones immediately and then delegating any future storytelling to lore triumphs that should've been dialog in the actual game (maybe not read by the voice actors but still there somewhere in the main arc). It's difficult to put into words, but storytelling in D1 was cohesive and whether or not it was good was based in interpretation. In D2, the storytelling is fragmented and sporadic, making it difficult to like anything, even if the initial idea was good. Ao D1, better storytelling. Not necessarily better stories, but the stories it told were told more cohesively. The mechanic of "storytelling" was better.

What about the dreaming city’s story in the weeks after forsaken? Or the invitations of the nine? I mean I was always sure to get on every three weeks when the queen was still around! I remember losing my shit seeing uldren get rezed. Not to mention the visual indicators of the pyramids getting closer and closer every week. And let’s not forget the saint 14 missions. I do agree with you with stuff like the taken war I miss those quest lines and how it eventually tied into kings fall