the active and passive skill systems should be reversed

I just tried Path of Exile this weekend and I must say I am impressed, but I have a few thoughts about it. I apologize in advance for the wall of words.

Fisrt of all I must say I am a huge fan of diablo 2, but I really didn't like certain things about it. This conflict had driven me to the point where I was deteremined to rebuild diablo 2 at some point in my life to fix certain things. Being a programmer myself, it probably is a feasible work-around if I devote a few years into it, but then I heard taht Diablo 3 was coming.
I had high expectations in diablo 3 hoping that it would be this "magical improvement of diablo2". After 500 hours of gaming I came up with the conclusion: "Can we fix it? Nope its fucked."

So basically that was my story, up until this weekend. I have to say I was looking at almost exactly what I had in my mind all these years. This is almost like a dream come true. As if someone read my mind and did all the implementation for me. The art style(espicially in act 2) was astonishing and the map-quest-waypoint UI system was gem. However, I soon realized the leveling system was rath different, and here are my thoughts about it.

For active skills, you have skill gems that levels up with the character. For passive skills, you have this universal skill tree. I think the active and passive skill systems should be reversed as will be explained in the following. For active skills, you should have a class confined skill-tree For passive skills, you have should have passive skill gems.

1) Get rid of the skill gems, and let them become part of your character's active skill tree
Let the active skills become something that is part of your character, someting inert, not an item taht could be traded. So each skill has its own experience and level up like the skill gem system taht you have now.
Let the players gain access to new active skills only after the parent(s) of that skill is of a certain level For instance if I wanted to get to ice nova, my ice spear has to be at least level 5 or something.
The skill should only gain exp when you use it.
For instance, when I was leveling up my witch I had a bunch of red combat gems stones sitting in my sockets that got leveled up too. I thought it was a very strange thing for these gem stones to level up since I wasn't using any of those skills at all.

2) Have class confined active skill pages, each containing its own skill tree like you normally would in Diablo 2. Because if any class could cast any skill, this just weakens the concept of classes. For a change, you could have some of the pages get shared amongst classes:
For a sorceress in diablo2 you would have 3 skill pages: ice, fire and lightning.
For a witch in POE you could have 3 pages :a "witch-only skill page", a "witch-templar skill page", " and a "witch-shadow skill page".
For a templar in POE you could have 3 pages :a "templar-only skill page", a "witch-templar skill page", " and a "templar-marauder skill page".
...etc

3) Get rid of the passive skill tree and make them into passive skill gems
Although it's an interesting idea to be able to get anywhere on the tree, I think it seemed rather unorganized. Since most nodes in the skill tree are just things like "+10 int" or "+2% attack speed", why not make them into passive skill gems? Let these passive skill gems level up like the skill gems taht you have right now. For instance, a "+ int" gem could be "+1 int" at level 1 and "+10 int" at level 5.

4) Make it possible to sock support gems into the active skill tree
Although I haven't collected too many support gems in my 2-days of gaming, I beleive taht its a major feature in the current system. You sock them next to your skill gem to enhance it. So all gear in the game have to fulfill 2 roles: items stats and gem carriers. I think it is rather strange to think of my gear as a wardrobe for gems. If u could sock the support gems into your active skill tree(as proposed above), I believe it just seems more natural.

I think this proposed system also eases the problem of redistributing skill points. Instead of having to make a new character when I fuck up with a build, I just go bakc to a slightly lower difficulty and level up the skill that I want to level. That way I can switch back to my previous build whenever I want to. Simply put, there is no such thing as a wrong build, everything is amendable and you get to keep both builds in the end. Amendable as in "you just have to devote more time into it, the penalty is the time taht you have to spend". So when a character levels up, all it really gains is some base stats, which is perfectly fine if you think about it.

Yeah so basically, those were some of my thoughts of the game.
Thank you for reading it if you did.

I'm pretty sure their intentions were not to make it like D2, but like something completely new/different from it. As far as my beta weekend went, it seemed like the devs of this game wanted COMPLETE freedom from the class structure. The only "confinements" you could say that were imposed are the suggestions on a path to build. What you're looking for is a more simple, "go down this road" type of skill tree. Not in this game.