A lot of people seem to be mixing up customization and "being locked into a choice you made".  D3 lets you try new skills as you get them rather than forcing you to select skill A from tree 1 or skill B for tree 2, and needing to make a new character or refer to a guide to prevent being stuck with an awful choice.

So what if at max level all characters of the same class are going to have 'access' to the same abilities?  Why is being forced to roll and level a new character because you spent points wrong a virtue? People using the same builds in D2 (hammerdin, bowazon, whatever else dumb names they had) was directly caused by there being one or two "right" ways to do things as any given class, which is far less of a choice than, say, any of the dozens of apparent (and not so apparent) synergies in the skills lists for the D3 classes.  Being able to shuffle your movelist around to better mesh with your group of friends is also super good.

Basically, at some point you need to see that those samey builds come about because of them being the "most effective" or "most fun", and that all things being equal, there's no reason to lock someone out of that, punishing them for being ignorant or making a mistake.  At the same time, allowing someone to experiment with different builds practically on the fly encourages experimentation while simultaneously taking away the focus from "A SPECIFIC BUILD FOREVER" towards "A BUILD THAT IS FUN AT THIS TIME".

Edit:  http://imgur.com/a/JWHtg#1  Here's a screenshot of a super old build's skill system, and it has the same sort of "put points into these separate trees and eventually unlock skills deeper into that tree" method.  The forced investment of specific things along that track, locking you out of other things, and sunk costs forcing you to max out in one tree primarily, are pretty detrimental to truly being 'custom'.

The people who laugh when doing that, or when that sort of thing is done to them, aren't laughing because of 'humor', they are laughing because of a primitive stress response of "this person is referencing a thing i am aware of- this is comforting".  It blows some of the dust off of their hideously anxiety-filled existence.

My niece laughing at Spongebob Squarepants is a more pure, honest response than anything these people can have.  These type of people literally cannot have anything we would call a 'sense of humor' because they are at a severe psychological deficit.

Comedy is in the creation, not the aggregation.

OUT OF THIS WORLD WISH KID DOUG THE TICK EEK THE CAT ALEX MACK

Haha you guys remember treasure trolls?  This guy knows what I'm talkin' about!  Heeeey buddy, nice gem you got!  Haha!  Shame their hair don't grow back when you cut it, am I right??  Go figure!!

CENTURIONS SNORKS SEA MONKEYS ALF ALF ALF ALF ALF ALF ALF

Also, "being feasible in practice", do the results not speak for themselves?

I mostly meant that I do not immediately believe that the Valve offices are the egalitarian classless worker's paradise they portray themselves as, but if you're going to bang on results I don't think many people will say Valve's track record is exactly unimpeachable.

It's a sort of recurring joke with friends and I that I'll jam out these elaborate and uncomfortable monologues that end in some variation of "and now i'm a skeleton".

The most notable usage I've gotten out of this 'technique' was in Lamezine.

You can see that here.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/21/valve-employee-handbook-leaked-read-it-here/ 

Anyone have a thought or two about this?  I'd heard that Valve employees basically don't have job titles, and similar, but part of me can't decide if that approaches being feasible in practice, and how much of this is just Valve cultivating a mystique about themselves.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

WARNING!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4AeXMEIeNI  WARNING!

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

Do you mean John Barrowman?

sci fi authors who mostly depict aliens as humanoid

One of Lem's contemporaries (I can't recall if they ever worked together), Ivan Yefremov, posits in Cor Serpentis that any alien life form advanced enough to attain space travel would have to have somewhat similar physiology and psychology, as well as a coherent, peaceful social structure (aka communism).  Ergo, any alien lifeform would be, essentially, human.  It is a very well executed concept, with the language and tone changing from "we met aliens" to "we met humans from another world" as the story progresses.

(Of note is the fact that there's no FTL travel in the story, so it's basically decided that any inter-planetary communication with their new space comrades is going to be a centuries long game of phone tag.)

[Shut the fuck up, John]

Shut the fuck up, John. The whole Boe Peninsula thing was a joke, we all know he's a joker, Harkness will remain handsome forever.  I won't budge on this!!

No joke, I don't think I've come into contact with a translation of the Divine Comedy that doesn't require full attention reading.  It's poetry, and dense with allusion and references to people who have been dead for centuries. 

For real, it amounts to a smear campaign against everyone Dante thinks belongs in Hell.

My prayers go out to all involved

The nerves in my arm were misbehaving.  There was sweat on my forehead, and I only noticed it when I realized I was digging into my wrist with my fingernails.  I couldn't stop.  It felt like my muscles were packed full of ground up shards of glass, and every motion I made caused these phantoms to slide deeper into the tissue.  The not-so-phantom incising pressure of my fingernails was relief.  There was blood under the nails at this time.  I remember seeing it getting packed deeper beneath them, past the quick, congealing, as I dug.  I couldn't stop.  My brain was fevered with so much sensation as I ripped up threads of skin and muscle, tearing a disgusting ring around my wrist.  I kept going, foregoing sleep, only taking water when absolutely required, and splashing some on the increasingly deep ravines of flesh to prevent scabbing, which hindered my progress.

That was six months ago.  I stand before you today a skeleton, proud and free.  Thank you for listening.

Super secret boss!?!?

I do so symbolically, all the time.

Take a joke then maybe you'll get how to tell 'em.

It's official because it's a better metric than you've put out, Sigvatr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE6Z1nBqLwo