I like deep and complex and i'm fine with steep learning curves, what i don't like is being punished by having my time wasted.

For me, you solve this by allowing easy experimentation with builds or allowing a respec. I want deep systems to allow customization and building of a character, but i don't want to be punished by having to restart X hours in because i made an bad (or ill-informed) choice.

Now, that argument against that is then choices don't matter and your choices should have consequences, but i think you can still make choices matter by allowing easy experimentation and respecs, infact, i think you make those choices far more interesting.

One of the interesting parts of this debate is i see a lot of people that argue against respecing in favor of choices that matter will play with a guide or consult a wiki. You don't want to find yourself 50 hours deep with a garbage character, so you look up a build and follow it. To me, that is super boring. I want to make my own character, i don't look up guides or wikis, it kills the fun for me. Allowing me to respec and experiment allows me to figure out how to build a good character, rather than being locked to my choices that were likely made with very little information.

I'll take 2 games as examples, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. I think both are great games, but this isn't about comparing them. POEs skill tree is massive and really neat to look through and plan builds. It's also quite punishing because barring a system that allows minor adjustments, you are locked in to your choices. That means you either follow a guide (yawn) or build a probably very sub optimal character and sink considerable time in to it. Contrast that with Diablo 3s system, you can swap skills and builds freely (within your chosen class) that lets you play with new skills as they unlock (rather than worrying about wasting a skill point on something) and find builds that work for you and syngerize.

Now, POE allows much more interesting choices in terms of builds, but if you follow a guide, those choices aren't yours so what's the point and if you try to develop the builds yourself, you're going to spend a huge amount of time rerolling characters because the nature of the system doesn't allow experimentation.

I think if you took POE and allowed respeccing, you'd have a much better game that allowed and encouraged experimentation with different builds, you'd still have a very deep, complex system, and the choices in your build would still matter and be impactful, but you wouldn't be forced to resort to a guide to make a good character, you'd be able to figure it out yourself, without wasting countless hours on new characters.