In my opinion, if we were truly given full autonomy to play our spec the way we wanted, there wouldn’t be level restrictions or 'I have to spend 3 talent points in order to unlock the next tier of talents. If the restrictions were lifted, we would have true autonomy and there would be more variety of ways to play our spec instead of how we have it now; where there are only 3 ways to play it, this way, that way, or the one that is kind of like the other but doesn’t have the full benefit of either one. Where is the freedom in restrictions? Why can’t I go down the left AND right side of my talent tree? Where is the choice? And where is the TRUE freedom?
They tried that in Vanilla, people abused it and made broken hybrid specs.
As opposed to random broken specs depending on Blizzard’s weird tuning and bugs?
For every strict and watered down system, you have years of the players abusing the systems in place for that.
The entirety of class design is watered down. That’s why none of the abilities do damage without 10+ damage modifiers.