the trouble with three branches and crosstraiting heavily punished, it all boils down to more or less only three valid options, all other combinations a severe compromise, resulting in a character not good at anything. there is nothing like the former flexibility in building your char left..
Trait trees should be rewarding / punishing skills, but still allowing to use everything you have available (of course a certain clean-up is called for, no matter which ways trees are implemented), not gating skills (except the former legendary cap stones).
Being stuck to one line, and not being able to switch stances temporarily, group content certainly will lose its appeal (guard dead? bad luck, no champ there to switch to glory to pick up the aggro for a few secs). oh wait, there is no group content, just some ugly looking something called big battles. Sorry, the video i was seeing looked nothing like something epic.. npc's standing around stiff like extras not knowing what to do..

I will spend the time til a few patches have been implemented with leveling my alts, and enjoying the quests in the areas I enjoyed so much when starting with my first character. With still 6 classes only in the 30s, I probably can continue til the next expansion arrives with yet another game mechanic bloating character development, leaving other stuff unfinished or moved to the store (legendary revamp, I look at you, with tier 7+ relics reappearing).

Well, I sound too much like a grumpy old man..
I hope this will turn out for the better, my pessimism mitigated by patches and simply 'getting used to it', my love for tolkien cushioning the fall.
Perhaps a housing update, perhaps with southfarthing in its bag, will win my love again :-)

To all of you excited for Helm's Deep: I wish you joy playing, don't let us naysayers spoil the fun for you.. !