I'm all for undoing bonusses on rep. Totally harmed roll-playing in favour of min-maxing and several instances where of the case "over to one side is useless, over to the other side is overpowered".
I don't see the issue with making levels useful. Yes, I LOVE few but powerful leveling. Much better than the common ARPG way of having 150 levels where you can make such wonderful choices like "do I want 2% more HP or 2% more damage"... leveling being actual EVENTS again as per good old-RPG's is a must that should stay.
As for talents, it was mostly an issue with a lot of bogus-stuff being around (PoE too). They could balance them in PoE by getting one "good" perk per level and then one "lesser" for the other levels rather than all putting them together. No-one's going to take +10% X elemental damage" when the alternative is an awesome class-specific ability instead.
D:OS didn't have that, but it did have a lot of talents that are, as mentioned before, less than useful and in very specific situations. Standing on surfaces for example (then again, at the start standing in certain stuff could do Tenebrium damage already at Cyseal, extremely overpowered, so they took that out).
