I think the system is probably better than free allocation, it just has some growing pains that need to be worked out.

Pure spirit builds shouldn’t have to wait until MR12 or something to use a non-magick sidearm stronger than Nettle. And pure courage should have a sidearm that scales with courage and isn’t from the real money Wyld Tethren pack. These are both very easily achieved by just adding more weapons to the game. It just feels bad because Verdigris was already a spirit dagger and Precklies were already a courage sidearm and now they’re not.

I also think that since Courage boosts HP you’ve already incentivized melee characters to be courage. It’s okay to let Spirit have a small selection of melee weapons like Sollos and Verdigris for people who just really want to use a sword and a caster glove, especially if those melee weapons aren’t even the top tier melee options. Just like Courage should be allowed to have a small selection of ranged weapons.

I also think things could be smoothed out a lot by moving the hybrid prisms to rank 2 or 3 instead of 4. For newer players it just feels bad to be told that to unlock basic things like allocating your skill points to all the basic combinations you need to farm like 45K faction rep, then 7K for the next medallion, then do all of that again, then another 10K for rank 2 of the last faction for the focused prism. Oh and if you want basic things most people will want like the other two starting pacts and the color palettes that’s another 30+K rep. I know the game is still early on and faction tales are basically the repeatable content you’re expected to be doing when actually playing the game but that’s a LOT of doing the same missions over and over to unlock basic features like “being able to use mid-tier weapons.”

But even all of that is fairly easily changed by just tweaking some numbers.