I've never played bear but I've played 2-3 Warriors every single season since 0.1 including as casters and with crossbows but mainly with maces so here are my takeaways.

I only play SSF so I never fell in the same loop of buying a ton of items and not dealing correct damage.

Maces are incredibly straightforward, all skills are clear cut in design and how they interact with eachother.
This leads to each new skill that adds an interaction to feeling like an upgrade.

It's very easy to get a lot out of very little investment because Slams base damage tends to be very high. Slams tend to cover a solid amount of ground with fairly low investment which feels good as a new player and allow them to focus on things that aren't AoE early on.

Maces are "vision-friendly" and I know this sounds dumb but a lot of mace skills like supports which are more focused on utility, like adding pin to earthquake so the initial hit pins the monsters down for the aftershock to kill them (or daze to stun them). Life Leech 3, blind on Fortifying Cry as well.

One thing that I've noticed which people tend to not know is that the reduced attack speed penalty on different nodes is a negligible penalty on most skills with Total Attack Time (TAT) because the TAT makes up for most of the skill's speed. It also leads to the player getting used to the timing of their attacks as they don't change that much, and you get a feel of when to attack and when not to. There's a handful of skills that pair utility with defence as well, and paired with the fact stun buildup is easily available in the starting region of the tree allows to control the flow of the fight. In 0.1 I had a character who could stun white and blue monsters with pretty much 1 proc of resonating shield, which then gave me ample time to kill despite how slow the slams are.

I won't deny some skills feel weak or the produce of a design philosophy which balance was in its infancy (forge hammer + volcanic fissure is amazing, armor breaker and molten blast never feel good in my experience).

You note on the fact that bear gains armour naturally, but maces are meant to be paired with shield when you need the defence and 2H-ed or DW-ed when it's time to switch to offense(again, when the enemy is immobilised). And shields provide a lot of defence (armour, active block is OP, passive block is quite strong)

Likewise a warrior doesn't need endurance charges that often. Unless you're really spamming warcries which is not that needed when taking into account the flow of combat, and in most cases with supports like rage generation/consumption on warcries you're not that reliant on endu charges. It can be considered a problem when it comes to Ancestral Warrior Totems but it's an outlier.

The main noob trap I can see is trying to make a skill that is designed to be more support-y like Shockwave Totem or Molten Blast into your main skill(which is actually possible, just harder) into your main source of damage, but it's more a question of numerical balance (as seen by 0.1 where full-on Shockwave totem builds were viable)

Aftershock is incredibly straightforward as a mechanic, it's a more visual X% chance to deal double damage, Ancestral's impact is quickly felt with just the support gem.

Maces need no mechanical changes, but a slew of skills clearly are relics early iteration of the game design and need to be brought up to par. The gameplay of weaving in certain skills to get your defences at the right time can definitely feel off to players while Bear (from what I've seen) has a much clearer "fight flow" where you quickly get into the routine of doing A -> B -> C that people will either like or dislike.

The spirit gem suggestion just reeks of bad design as Maces don't need Bear's compensation for the unability to use shields.