My personal opinion on character customization is that the fun comes in when you can actually understand the rules:
If I hadn't played AD&D at the time when BG & Co came out, the character development wouldn't have had half the appeal to me, personally.
Now to the question / problem I am seeing: With an IP game like PE, where the rules are developed by Obsidian themselves, the problem could be that those rules are too hidden from the player. There are two sides, of course: On the one hand you want to have it as complicated as possible, to allow many options and leave as much room