Personally I like the idea of ap being standard and not being changed by an allocation of stats like in the first one, but ellezards suggestion of messing with ap more in gear or possibly spells other than just haste could give it some more flare.
I agree the gear felt rather lackluster as everything was only stats with the occasional gear piece with a skill but given how randomized the gear was if you found a gear piece with a skill you actually wanted then you were rather lucky. gear could have been made much more interesting if you could level up your gear, allowing you to pick interesting gear choices and keep with them, which would open them up to actually add interesting variations without it being defeated by that fact that you change gear pieces every other level. If you want to keep the feeling of progression in there, just make upgrading the stats on gear take crafting items that you get in the new areas you explore as you progress. Maybe you only find bronze to upgrade your weapons with on fort joy, then you find better metals later, something like that.
It might make more sense to give some more flare to the skill tree before something like the gear system though. I would very much like to see tiers for rank 5 and 10 milestones for every school that do something interesting for example.
