It's true that you can be able to feel an illusion of authority

The process of determining the best location to WOW TBC Gold spend that one talent point and the new spells I could buy was a big deal. I remember coming back a later expansion and seeing that the one agency I'd left with regard to my character's growth was the place to put one talent each... 10? 15? Levels. Each level was learned slowly and there was no rush to master the skills. Sadness. I'm not sure about you, but for me.

I can't argue with their reasoning for trying to change the tree of talent (too common many people just browsed for a building using that build and it was a matter of abilities like 1% increase damage to targets aren't "exciting") but then they simply made them more flexible with choices which... ended as being boring and/or required to have the spec not feel awful and feel even more restrictive.

Too diluted even for a noob. It was apparent to them that they were trying to reach more novice players. As a player who isn't a professional, I can tell you that they did not succeed by dumbing down one of the greatest gameplay mechanics.

This is not a win-win-win-win for developers, I think. Many players, like you, are addicted to the flimsy feeling of authority and mastery which comes with placing points in exactly the same locations as everyone else. If you restrict it to reasonable alternatives that are balanced, but without a correct answer, they're depressed, sad, and limited.

Talents were an awful mechanic. The smart people searched for the best levelling specs and in a haze followed it, but noobs and casuals got in trouble. Intelligent people sought out the most reliable raiding specification, and then they adhered to it with a mindless. Raids filled with abso-fuckingly identical warriors, warlocks, mages, and rogues, all following the identical BiS sets and having identical rotations, resulted in raids with identical specifications. There is no homogeneity throughout the world and there are plenty of ways to get fooled and get called a naive by all the other players. You'll need be required to pay a tax in order in order to remedy the issue.

It's true that you can be able to feel an illusion of authority and control when you make your fourth ability in "Do +1 percent more" or your thirty-first talent in "This should have been an built-in level 40 capability". However, it's a fake. It's not like you're developing how to do something or mastering something much more intricate than what the five-year-old's sticker book could tell. (But it's also true that I suspect that a lot of Classic's most passionate supporters are the kind of people who bolster their self-esteem by thinking that winning a fifteen-year old game solved by playing children's sticker-book level minigames makes the cheap Burning Crusade Classic Gold player a true gaming god.)