[Kameron8]

I don't understand how removing Aptitude and adding an extra 60 points is supposed to provide variance in builds when all it does is give you enough points to soft cap more than half of the stats. Nor do I think a few days of closed beta testing is enough time to determine what is 'mandatory'.

You might be right on both fronts here, but at the very least the way in which aptitude (and really stats in general) interact with the soft cap is what drives this. With 40 aptitude, you can hit the soft cap in 5 stats, and approach the soft cap on a sixth. The rest of your stats bump up by a non-insignificant value. With 0 aptitude, you can hit the soft cap in 4 stats, and approach a 5th. Given that one of the stats you're soft capping in the first example is aptitude, they're essentially the same. Except, the aptitude build gets 8 into every other stat in addition to the 4.5 softcapped stats.

It may be way too early to say what's mandatory, and it may be too heavy handed to remove the stat entirely, but it is not unreasonable to say that Aptitude is mathematically more efficient than any alternative in almost every build. That alone seems like an issue to me.