Why would you take the ability to chose from the player specially when you put so much emphasis on player agency and customization? The only reason that comes to mind is to make things easier on people with low D&D knowledge and even so is a bad reason because you're picking your spells everywhere else in the game already so... I don't know, doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm sure Larian had their reasons. The point of Pact of the Tome is you get cantrips that Warlocks wouldn't normally have access to so maybe they couldn't get the game to offer access to those cantrips belonging to other classes only one time. I don't think they did this specifically for the intrinsic joy of refusing to give you choice. It can be difficult to always get things to work as intended in a videogame. But honestly, this is fine. That is a very good selection of cantrips.
I obviously don't think they are doing it just ''to get a kick out of our despair'' but they can just be wrong. You might remember how they categorically refused to go the solasta route with the reaction system and 3 years later here we are. I think not being able to chose in this particular instance is just bad and unless they just can't do it because of tech reasons (wich I find reaaaally hard to believe) they should let the player chose.
I remember back in the day when bard got introduced into the game one mod had a workaround for you to get the expertise where you wanted instead of the ones you got by default (I don't remember much because I don't play bard and it was a long time ago but I remember being sad about not being able to chose)
You only get 12 lvl ups and some of them don't add much, just don't make a good level up worse without a VERY good reason xD
