Why respec should be for free

Theres 3 groups of players:
1. Players that follow a buildguide. They rarely respec because the guide says exactly what to do. So the gold cost has little to no effect on them.
2. Players that know what they’re doing, and are not following a guide. They might respec more often if they’re not following a guide, but they know how to make gold quickly. So the gold cost has little to no effect on them.
3. Players that don’t know what they’re doing, and are not following a guide. They struggle and need to experiment a lot, meaning they’re constantly needing to respec, and they don’t know how to farm gold quickly. They get stuck with terrible passive trees and no money to respec.

The respec gold cost therefore really only really hurts the players that struggle the most. That seems unnecessary.

If you need to redo your whole tree, just making a new character costs zero gold, and getting back to maps takes very little time, even less if you keep lvling rares around.

This isn't an issue.

I still think orbs of regret were a better system, or both regrets & gold like poe1 currently has.

People said the issue with orbs of regret is it makes respecs costly early on when orbs of regret are scarce and then inconsequential to higher level players who find them constantly.

Gold has the same problem still but worse since it has other competing uses like gambling for gear in campaign.