I think the bigger issue is that the game is still in beta. When they make large changes to the way the game works (i.e. changing slots on items, drastically changing values of items, changing requirements to equip items, etc) they should either allow people to respec, or reset everyone's characters to scratch (but you keep your gold/equipment).
There's been a lot of good game mechanic changes, and I think that increasing the riding requirement on horses was good, as well as making crossbows 2 slots instead of 1. But it really did fuck over quite a lot of people who were "finished" retiring, and even caused people to quit the game due to their builds/equipment being no longer useable.