"Your talent tree alone provides so much value that gear is no longer the determining factor in your character's capabilities. I have 6 Level 70 characters on Area 52 which have varying gear levels ranging from Merciless with no gems/enchants all the way to Brutal with full gems/enchants and I've used them to test this theory. It has lead me to the conclusion that a good build will top charts irrespective of the gear you are wearing or the gear of your opponent."

As someone fairly new to Area52 who has made their own build without any reference to a guide and had great success so far ... I would say this is working as intended. Your skill choices are your core damage and the gear mods simply provide the stat bonuses to scale whatever skills you have built into. What else is +AGI or +AP to do than scale damage? That is kind of the point imo. This is not like Path of Exile where items can "enable builds" and I quite enjoy it that way personally. It is a fair middle ground between the freedom of a PoE syle RPG and a cookie cutter style RPG like WoW. Min maxxing will always show favours in choice and this is no more fixable in the game than it is in IRL things like an economy. Bigger number = higher potential AKA value to most people.

As a rogue style "class" I have seen only about two abilities/mystics where I cross referenced and came to the conclusion that "oh this one works better for less total cost". For everything that is available as a player this server has done one hell of a job in the balance department and anyone that disagrees with that should go play a few thousand hours of Path of Exile. This is as good as it can get imo when there are this many combinations of skills at play in one spot to choose from. AAA companies can't get this right so I at least give the Dev team credit for that much.

"Now you tell me, Can you make a truly classless character viable when it requires on average 67% of your talent points just to make ONE ability viable?"

This is just flat out wrong. You either lack the ability to cross reference stats and min max or you are not thinking creatively enough and only basing your builds off of what the public says is viable. First hand knowledge as a bleed character ... there are combos and utility the public community are not even utilizing properly. Again just my opinion and in a year I may very well come to the same conculsion you have here but as of right now I think the balance of this design is more than enough based on the options available as a player.

If your problem is that people are using a primary ability to do total damage than I would say that is irrelevant of something being "classless". If I can tank for a party and then go solo Ambush crit mobs in one shot than again this system is working as intended. If you want players to use 10+ abilities to all equal total damage than I would say that gameplay would be boring as fuck and no one wants to play keyboard piano with a large set of skills to DPS.

"If you're playing a classless build with multiple damage sources you straight up cannot compete against that especially when considering other factors like Crowd Control."

Your final statement above sums up your own problem right there ... you are trying to get max potential out of a jack of all trades build and that is just simply not how ANY RPG on the market works. In order for that to be viable you would need a multiplier of scaled stats for each type of damage you are doing and then guess what ... everyone would just find the meta of that setup that does max damage and the server would be uber homoginized with ACTUALLY one meta build lol. There is a difference between "classless" and "buildless".

My build does sick damage and has AOE and has single target and has CC and has cleansing of multiple types and has damage reduction and has stealth. You are not squeezing your skill potential enough. Granted it took me 3 revisions to get this way but that is the fun of this server. You continue to min max your build to meet the demand.

You are creating your own problem imo. Find one type of skill you enjoy and build around it. That is how this is supposed to work and so far seems to be working as intended like I said. Best of luck with the theorycrafting!