Some of it’s an opinion but nothing I said isn’t true. Sure, if I started the game with the goal of flying class C ships I could get there by level 4, but I didn’t. I played the game for a time doing other things and then came to a point where I saw an NPC selling a ship I wanted. So I grinded to get the money, saw that I needed to rank up piloting but I didn’t have any points. So I needed to level up 3 times and I needed to kill a few dozen ships. So I grinded that out and bought the ship which, with getting the money, took me the better part of a day.
Then, after I bought that ship and got the ability to fly it I couldn’t add any additional crew compared to my starting ship because that is locked behind a different perk, which would mean 4 more levels (which take time now), and many more destroyed ships with X number of crew on board, to get the most crew on my ship; EXCEPT that it’s a master tier perk so I would first have to sink many more points into that tree to even get there. So I guess screw whatever build I was going for, if I want more crew I have to go deep into the Social tree.
Take stealth for example. To even get a stealth meter I have to drop a point into stealth. To get a meter that is slightly better and on par with the default stealth meter in their other games I need to put in another point. Want to pickpocket an enemy? Takes a point to even unlock the ability. Want to even use a boost pack? Point.
It’s fine to unlock abilities through the trees, there’s more of these that I didn’t mention that I’m fine with, but this does not compare with their previous games. In Skyrim, if I want to pickpocket I just try to do it. It sucks for a while but it levels up and gets better by doing it. I don’t need to go grind enemies to level up so that I can get a little better at pickpocketing. If I want to be stealthy I just need to sneak around to work on leveling up the skill and I get the UI from the beginning. If I want to work on the heavy armor skill I don’t first have to get through light armor.