QoL skills being 'trapped' behind anything is bad.
QoL skills being forced into some mockery of a 'choice' is bad. (Mockery because you will
always pick the QoL over anything, explicitly because its QoL. So, it's never a choice.)
Being forced to pick between one QoL skill
or another is bad.
Here's where it's difficult.
Everyone has a different idea of what QoL is. Everyone assigns different values to the same things because they want different things out of the game.
Everyone wants to do different things in different ways, but now some of them are finding it really difficult to do that. Or in some cases straight up
can't do that.
This is why the current skill system has caused such a fuss.
Not everyone can consistently pick what they consider to be QoL skills any more, and that introduces a degree of frustration. Especially when you are 'forced' to spend your very limited amount of points on things you're either not really interested in, or would be counterproductive to what you want to do in order to get them or other skills that you
are interested in.
Someone gave a description of the 'old' system which was really great: "Perfect Parallelisation".
You could take multiple skill sets in parallel, and it didn't matter what you were trying to do there was always a way to support that so long as you had points available.
Balancing this is hard. But it doesn't need to be perfect, only 'good enough'.
The previous setup wasn't perfect, but it was far more flexible that what we have currently. And if combined with the respec ability, this balance would have a much wider margin for 'good enough' since choices are no longer permanent.
Balancing the current skills is easier
if you only balance for a very narrow view of player activity, which is what has happened.
And all the players who didn't care very much for being shoved into that narrow box are now unhappy with being shoved into a narrow box that previousy they could have avoided entirely.
And furthermore, I consider that gated skills must be destroyed.