As a bit of a tangent point to all of this: I've never felt particularly rewarded for killing things with no gold for quest rewards and little-to-no loot off of any monsters.
Indeed, I also don't think it makes any sense that stealing anything and everything your characters can access is a good answer, because some people, myself included, do not enjoy stealing and it breaks my immersion to run around someone's house while they don't stop me and take everything not nailed down.
That's a very good point. Rather than handing out a whole bunch of stuff straight from the beginning, I think it would be more interesting to have better rewards for completing quests and killing monsters. Completing quests more often than not feels a little underwhelming, and that would actually be my main concern about the game so far. You get a handful of XPs (about the worth of killing 1-3 monsters), a little journal entry, and a random loot from killing a special monster if the quest involves one. Perhaps a little gold for turning in quests might be a good idea.
For the sake of the argument though, just because a game promises freedom of choice doesn't mean that every choice must be good or as equally rewarding as the other possible choices. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of having to choose. That is something that the game should make you consider when you decide to steal or not, just as much as when you spend points on Intelligence rather than Constitution.
Overall, however, I have not felt cheated on the money I gained from playing through and what I could buy with it. I did pick up a few things here and there, but not that much and rarely owned property. My co-op partner went for a more thief like approach, so he lockpicked a lot of doors and a lot of chests, got rewarded plenty for it. That was his gold though, he never gave me any and it didn't keep me from buying the skills or items I wanted.
This is not exactly Baldur's Gate 2, where you come out of the first zone with dust filled pockets and are immediately exposed to amazing vendors who sell kick ass gear for insanely high amounts of gold you'll probably never have, because by the time you do, their inventory will have changed, and the new items cost even more.
Keep in mind this is just a fragment of the game. I'm sure we'll have plenty of other opportunities to buy, sell, steal, loot, you name it. The final game will not be limited to Cyseal. It seems obvious, right. Or does it ?
[EDIT]: Sidenote, someone mentioned a shared inventory for all characters, which I'm not too keen on, for various reasons. However shared gold between all characters seems something worth looking at.
