What's wrong with purple items?

What's wrong with purple items? Lately, it seems just about every purple-text item I find is completely useless. That includes 3 just this afternoon: the little beauty above, a bow, and IIRC a salvage item. All required identification, and all were basically white items in terms of stats.

All lists I've seen of item quality list the white-blue-purple-yellow-red progression as a matter of simple increasing quality, but I've never seen a blue this crappy (it's not even good for a white). Is it possible that they're completely different types of generated items? Or is the above a bug?

Purple items have the chance to spawn with better stats, but they're still randomly generated, and there's a chance that they won't get modifiers. They do tend to have some advantages to them, though- you won't find many wands that do that much damage which only require 2 points in the linked attribute.

Well, i always thought that purple items could be salvaged for items such as hilts/runes, though im not too sure, because the only rune i had was by mistake, and i didnt get to keep it(only unlock it) because i used normal salvage kit

I've seen some random stuff too. Not always worthwhile but you can only hope to get something that'll work out. Mentioned above is the order of rare drops (by color), are there actually red drops out there? If so, what are they normally and, if someone has one, can they post a pic of it?

I got an awesome yellow axe drop from a Hill Giant in Sanctum Cay yesterday. The only way I'll change is if I can find something that does more than -86 base damage to an enemy (thats before customizing it too). That may not sound awesome to some people but that is wicked in my book!