This is something I found interesting about the types of games that I really enjoy and if I'm honest the games that I find myself keep coming back to are those games that are easy to learn and hard to master. Or if they do have complexity it's more to do with story choices and interesting level design etc. than whatever stats you pick for your character at the beginning.
Particularly with RPGs, A great example of this comparison would be Fable 1 and Diablo 2. There are enough options in the game to keep you occupied gameplay wise and find a style you like. However it's not so overwhelming and pants on head retarded that you could be an autist and end up making an excel spreadsheet comparing all the miniscule amounts of stats to find out which is the 'best' class or stats setup.
I'm also thinking about this in terms of appearance customisation and all that nonsense. I wonder if the RPG development cycle overall for an indie dev especially wouldn't end up benefiting by deliberately restricting the options you're going to have so that you can focus more on the depth of the classes you have and the gameplay. As opposed to having 30+ different builds with nothing to show for it which is what most modern RPGs are now.
As an example instead of the usual 'le modern RPG' setup where you've inevitably got 30+ options in the character selection I'd potentially just have Warrior/Thief/Mage/Cleric. Something I really appreciated for example even though BG2 has quite a few class options is stuff like class oriented storylines and quests.
The leveling only looks complicated because you aren't using the filter buttons. I also made that mistake until I just recently found them.
I was thinking about this but I'm going to refuse to release any tutorial for my games just to spite people for that. That's annoying, why didn't they have that enabled by default? Lol.
The filters aren't on by default because the "fail" state (not noticing the tabs) is the game is playable but you have to scroll a bunch when you level up. If they were on by default the "fail" state would be that the player doesn't have access most of the talents.
I agree they aren't the most obvious but at the same time filter tabs are something that be expected of the kind of player who would pick up an involved game like this.
You are right though that the leveling UI is pretty crap and needs to be its own full-screen overlay.