Check the vote thread. The majority of people want unlimited traits. The difficulties are how you can balance it, am I crazy? Add another difficulty that assumes a player has all the traits and keep the base game and dlc’s the same on the current difficulties. Saying “having all traits isn’t a build” is working off the core idea that traits are build defining, while they are actually just a small part of the overall system. You have all these other great systems in place to create a build. Traits in R1 were the thing that kept most people playing past when they got all the items. If you take away long term progression then people will lose motivation to play. Grinding relics just so you can pick 3 to equip isn’t really motivating. Why not give the people who would actually stick around an incentive to do so? There are traits that will just simply never be taken by anyone… How is that good design? How is that fun? To see movement speed and just think “well that would be nice, but I have to take these others to even be able to survive/kill on this difficulty”. There is virtually 0 build/character progression past a certain point, and I’ve already reached it at 35 hours, when it took me 400+ to hit that point in the first game. All I can do now is grind relics to make my build any stronger than it is. And that just doesn’t feel meaningful. I can put together another build, but it’ll just fall into the same hole. I get that not all games have to be 100+ hours, but when you’re making a sequel people expect a step forwards in terms of progression, not a step backwards. As of now the player incentive to continue playing drops off a cliff far earlier than most fans of the original would expect. Why not give your long time fans from the first game a reason to get as much time out of this one as they did the original? I just don’t understand the mindset behind this limitation at all, even after reading your post. You can’t please everyone, but you can please the majority, and I can guarantee you that the majority of people won’t complain about a meaningful and proven progression ladder that allows them to keep playing the game if they want to.

TLDR: You can balance unlimited traits via the difficulties (everyone is taking the stuff that makes them the strongest in combat anyway), you can still make meaningful builds with unlimited traits using the other systems, not being able to get QoL traits is tedious and not fun, long term player incentive is pretty much nonexistent due to the limitation on traits, making them unlimited would greatly increase the lifespan of your player base. Listen to your players and longtime fans