PoE2 Respec rant

So, to my story: I'm a fairly experienced PoE player but I haven't played for a while so I was excited to play Poe 2. I like to experiment with builds and synergies. I started the Early Access as a Mercenary with frag rounds and explosive grenades. Act 1 was a chore and this class seemed to be very clunky for me. I know that I probably didn't take the most efficient nodes on the tree so I ended up having to grind down those bosses with many deaths, due to lack of damage and not knowing the mechanics. Start of Act 2, I was absolutely stuck to the hyena boss after I beat geonor with like 20 deaths. I was already geared up and tried many different 2x support gem variantions, but still, the damage seemed lackluster.

I was fed up so I decided to switch out my crossbow with a bow, to try to lean into the ranger tree and see if it feels better. I socketed one gem to test it out and, surprise. A 0link poisoburst arrow alone did more damage than my entire previous setup. From there, I was blasting through act 2 by adding toxic venom to my setup together with supportive flashgrenades. As the hitpools began to get bigger and bigger it quickly fell off. I managed to finish the acts, but no matter what I upgraded, no matter what I tested every single combinations of poison/dot/chaos nodes in the tree I wa salways 1 step behind in terms of damage and hadn't even thought about incorporating any defensive nodes in my passive tree. I grinded cruel up to Act 2, but in the back of my head I knew I wanted to fully respec again and try to go for a hit based elemental bow skill. I was interested in combinating gemling's usefull ascendancy nodes for this build and add in stuff once the foundation is done.

Turns out I have to farm around 300k gold in areas that are farmeable, which means around 6 levels below me, for me to be able to respec. Additionnally, I'd have to get another pair of jewelers orbs, runes etc. to get 4links again. It would take me around 20 hours of playtime if I was lucky. It feels terrible. Gold cost for respec is way too expensive and prevents players from experimenting with their builds at the level they are playing. I should not be forced to go down 10 levels to farm gold for my respec and to be safe for refarming jewellers. Gold costs are exponentially higher so it makes u completely stuck in the game, forcing you to grind instances for loot just to try a new setup. Fix this please, it is very unintuitive. Thank you!

It should just be free early on in my opinion. It punishes players to experiment new builds and grid locks them into a playstyle. They should make it a cost during the ENDGAME because by then, players have learned and experimented.

Let players have fun trying new things. No one wants to farm gold like that.....

nonono
no fun. only suffer

Our mistake was having fun, cant have that.

+1 only for Early Access.

Is there... any reason that this could have been in one of the other threads about this very thing?