It’s almost like they could have done a community poll and addressed this major change in philosophy on a grand scale, something they’ve done before for other important issues (Patch 1.2 Timeline, 1.1 Event Updates, and Cycle Poll).
They’ve literally done this song and dance before. Announce something. There’s backlash from part of the community, they release poll. Just skip the backlash and release a poll. “hey guys, we’ve been reconsidering our design philosophy on Mastery Respecs, here’s a poll to get a pulse on how you, the community, feel about this change.” throw in a handful of options to get a general idea of how the community feels, and decide based on that. If the 5-10 of us in this thread upset by the change are the only people in the community who would be upset by it, then I’d completely concede my point. But the fact is it’s been a point of debate for over 5 years and even as recently as November 2024 the devs had no intent to make this change.
Edit: as I’ve said though. What’s done is done. It will be implemented whether we like it or not. I just hope that things don’t get worse because of Flavor of the Month changes like this and WASD taking up dev time from actually important changes like finishing masteries that are missing skills and the lack of class identity for masteries like Shaman.