The best way to get something done is to show it needs to be done. Nobody truly takes you seriously when you claim HA is overpowered yet there are very few HA around because it's a pain in the ass to level up and play. I say we need more free respecs if we want to really get this game to a balanced state.
My suggestion concerning that was always to safe char builds and load them later dependent on situation you need it. Then you also only would need 1 char which is accumulating all XP. This round you play ranged (load build done), next round 2h hero(load build done), then you goto a Strategus match and they are lacking cav for overland battle (load build done). 1 main char, different builds, 1 XP pool(no lost time) fuck respecs. You can still keep generations for heirlooms and you can keep max lvl. In the end this would also make balancing on the server by role(build) possible, flavour of the week .. an army composition with 10%ranged/90% cav or next week 20%ranged/40%inf/... this could be broken down to single weapons ... how many of those may be used ...
anyhow i use for roughly 16 generations the same gear, nearly the same build and warned about the ranged trend for over 2 years now. Only one nerf realy did reduce the amount of ranged, there we got then lots of QQ and the devs wet themselves and revoked the changes.
Now we have so many ranged on the eu servers, that if there really would be a proper balancing taking care of that "problem", devs may fear even more to loose regular players ... it just gotten out of hand as i see it.