I don't recall being able to respec in BG1 or BG2 (or many later games). But now it seems to be viewed as indispensable - although when people didn't have it, they did perfectly fine.
That's because annoyingly massive amounts of people basically just automatically "prefer" and defend things being whatever way they already are, regardless of what that is.
With the game having released with the easy respec, there's a lot of people saying it's better this way and shouldn't be changed, and only some saying it should be changed.
If the game had released without the easy respec, and someone suggested providing it, there'd be a lot of people saying it was better without it and the game shouldn't be changed (to the way it is now).
A lot of the SAME people. The exact same people arguing for this state, would argue for that state, because what they really argue for and feel they prefer, is just whatever is already the case.
It's a phenomenon that's easily observable with many examples across many games.
