Normal, Veteran, Elite...what's the point?

[skywise]

My friend and I, after having cleared out some area under easter island, decided to try the veteran level of the multiplayer map.
Anyone know what's the point of changing the difficulty level?
Encounters have the same hitpoints (in single from EZ to Hard HP double), same money drops (since they copied 90% of Diablo why didn't they also copy bigger money drops?), same quality items.
My friend thinks they hit better/harder...but heck why does he have to move his grand sorcerer in the middle of a pack of droogs all the time? :P
Frankly the only difference I really noticed it that the higher diff levels keep newbies out :P

[Wanderer-Z]

They hit harder in Veteran and Elite. They also take much less damages. If your weapon show 100-150 damages, in Veteran mode, you will actually be doing much less damages than that unless your melee skill is high enough. They also drop a ton load of gold (you should have noticed this from the first drop of gold that you find). Also, they do drop better items, though not 100% of the time. As far as item quality, you'll notice more of a difference with the vendors. They pretty much sell the same quality items or better in the first town of veteran as they are in the last town of regular mode.

quality The amount of life on the monsters is based on the number of people in the game, not based on difficulty. Easy, normal, and hard difficulty will adjust how hard they hit and how high their defense are.

This leads me to believe... Regular/Hard is probably equal to Veteran/Easy?