@zanos, this wasn’t added at the 11th hour, Swen said this would be in the final game 3 years ago when the EA launched. Every complaint you have can be mitigated by three words: “don’t use it.”
I will be changing Minsc’s class every time I play a new campaign. Mostly as a barbarian, but I will do one novelty playthrough where he is a wizard and I will do this because he won’t be acting like a wizard at all. It’s awesome Larian gives people like me this option, as it wasn’t hard to program, so why not?
You are correct, don't like it, don't use it. But my point was that it is a bit ironic that almost all of the promotional materials, interviews, roundtables, and advertising for this game was about storytelling, choices, reactions (both on character and world), and companion stories. And then they introduce a mechanic that completely makes all of what was said, not necessarily pointless, but certainly diminished. They didn't market this game on mechanical flexibility, that came much later (as in a couple days ago), they marketed it on what I said, so I just find it a little peculiar that they would go this route. And again, I am speaking to this on a purely design level, not on the flexibility of player choice. That said, I think from a storytelling perspective, it would be likely fine to multiclass, but they should have probably kept at least one level in the base class for narrative consistency. Pretty sure most games go that route, you can respec, but the 'base', the 'core' stays one way, and you can add onto that. Otherwise, as I said, they probably should have developed a few characters that had 'classless' storylines and allowed you to change them, that seems to me to be the best case, especially in keeping with their vision.
