The point was no partial respec would have worked correctly. Let's say there's a 24/15 with 0IF, 5 shield, 8PS, 5 riding, and 5WM. His ideal 15-24 would sacrifice shield to fill WM and riding. A partial respec would leave him with 5WM instead since shield isn't refunded. I didn't notice this until after the partial respec. It still would have probably been better than 3str so I'm not really disagreeing, it just had a few problems of its own. At the time, I was being overly cautious, especially since there was not much precedence for partial respecs for every difficulty change until recently.