I think you are largely discounting that a majority of your time is actually spent acquiring the gear that enables you to play a given spec on a given class; or even multiple specs.
I’m curious what difference there is to you in swapping between two characters, for example, your Lightning Sorc and your Frost Sorc, versus simply respec-ing your Sorc between its Lightning Spec and Frost Spec.
Ah yes I forgot freedom was actually being unable to make changes as you want /s
No thanks! D3 lost all sense of weight with skill choices.
Respeccing needs to be painful as if your soul stone is removed.
If Respeccing is free, creativity and diversity is gone and people will play the same game that a streamer or youtuber plays.
The Diablo series is about hellish pains. Do you still remember D1?
I see so many players who don’t enjoy the background of Diablo but just nagg about the gear of others and unfairness.
If you are a jealous type, Diablo is not the game for you.
Decisions need to have impact!
Really baffles me why the devs are going down the road of restrictive system when free system can provide them with net gain in terms of player retention and replay value without additional cost to the development in the future. Not only that, free respec system would synergize/scale so well with future contents, because players now have more stuffs to play around with, which means better play value for players (a.k.a player retention and future player acquisition, which are crucial for live service games afaik). This simple value change can snowball into this overall larger net gain with 0 additional costs in the future but they are insisting on missing out on that opportunity to make more without spending more than they have to. 
Because restrictive respecs might exactly give them that player retention and replay value? Seems more likely at least, as it just makes the game more interesting to play overall.
If you thought that build would be fun then why weren’t you playing it to begin with? This is why we need full trading. If you find a good item for a build that you don’t find fun then you can trade it for an item that supports your desired build. That way you don’t feel obligated to run a build that isn’t fun for you.
It could be that there is more than just one build that is fun to play. I don’t trade, i build around what I find.
More interesting to have to potentially divert your playtime from the pursuit of fun in order to pay the cost(s) to get some play variety?
Those who don’t want to respec can not respec.
Those who do want to respec can respec.
There’s no need for a cost for it. There are plenty of other factors to weigh in on players’ decision with regards to whether or not they respec.
Weird how I can play whatever I feel like in D3 but if I want to not be absolute trash in something like PoE I have to use crap like path of building and follow it because it’s a pain in butt to respec.
No it won’t it will do the opposite just like covenants did just like original azerite armor implementation did.
Not everyone wants to do the weird trading crud self found play is fine just let us respec to make use of what we have found ourselves.
You get gold by doing the things you would already be doing in the game. So you dont need to divert to anything.
If you don’t want to trade you don’t have to. You can always switch to a spec that you don’t know if it will be fun to test out a piece of gear. You will just have to pay the gold cost to respec and farm out new gear with the stats you need for that spec. Unless you get lucky and all of the necessary stats for the new spec were the same as your old spec. I doubt that will be likely though.
Loadouts would require changing your helmet for different skills. This is not the way.
And it will change within a year 
But there are resist nodes.
I don’t know about you but it’s a chore just to consider multiple builds to begin with.
But unfortunately there are people that will do this so your statement is inaccurate at best.
Well fortunately for you each season you’ll have to make a new character for those said updates.
They lose players each season, just as PoE does. But, that player base comes back for the start of those seasons so what is your gripe again?
I clearly see with this thought how easily it will be to circumvent their removal of the “reset dungeon” button and exploit this feature.
Sadly it’s even more of a chore to respec than you think. There is no respec button to click on in paragons. What you choose there is what you get and if you need to fix 1 mistake you made on a board you will be right clicking for a long time and the cost remains the same each click. So doing a respec while out in the wilds is not something anyone will be doing. As such it will take some time to rethink that board.
What I am seeing here is that you absolutely want D4 to be the next D3 where the vast majority of players are tired of doing GR 150s. I get it you probably haven’t done it solo yet but stop trying to make D4 the new D3. When you finally see end game your decision to respec will dwindle.
And to be clear, they did design the game around respeccing paragons while in a GR until it got so bad because of the abuse they eventually locked it down where you could not.
I don’t think it’s done horribly wrong. I think it’s the pandering to players that want things easy. I can tell you the total cost to respec your entire paragon boards and then where you can farm that gold back in under an hour in WT4 but NDA says I can’t. Until you get to end game just know this, this entire argument is moot and you should make haste to end game.
I’m pretty sure that question about a macro keyboard, which was answered by a Blue post in D3 forums back in 2012, trumps the MVP response in a WoW forum in 2020 where ToS is vastly different.
It won’t change if they see player avarage gold, which clearly they can per the e-mail sent to each player that participated in beta.
I made that comment before I saw the developer updates where they removed the reset dungeon button.
If it is free to respec, you play less because you continue on the same character, if you are bored to pay, you create a second char, play more and are more susceptible to buy stuff from shop. Blizzard is a cash machin, every single thing that makes you spend more time in this game is elaborated intentionally and carefully.
Accept it, 10 years for a new Diablo version it has a cost, the game is good, play the rules and damn it give your money man !!!
I’m just glad we are finally getting a reset button. I just hope that its per board and not just full reset. The cost doesn’t bother me. Although, if it turns out I have to reset all the time because of these resist changes, I may change my mind on that. I also wish there was a way to save specs and just swap even with a cost if necessary.