Guild Wars 2

Add Legendary stat-swapping ability to ascended items and restore max stats to Exotic levels. This should help maintain current game balance and comfort treadmill-fearing players while keeping Ascended items a tangible and desirable mid-term reward to work towards.
Incidentally, Inscriptions are probably also a bad idea (relatively high cost combined with highly specialized effects creates a barrier to flexibility, even if the effects of the inscriptions are very limited). With the Living Story and important system updates revitalizing the game, the current Ascended tier is a devastating step back.
The ability to switch secondary professions after Ascending in Prophecies provides a neat lore parallel for the change.

The OP’s post fully and eloquently expresses a lot of the concerns I’ve had with the game lately. I like a lot of what they’re doing with the living world updates, if not story-wise than certainly in terms of systems improvements such as the wallet and the party finder. Arenanet is currently fixing a lot of the initial holes in the game’s design. However, with ascended weapons they’ve added a far larger one. I just don’t want to play a game with this little flexibility available in playstyle, where it takes this long to bring a new character up to snuff.
Arenanet, how could you, I expected so much better, you’ve lost a loyal player since GW1, etc. etc. I’ve uninstalled the game for now, and it’s the first time in memory I’ve uninstalled GW out of actual distaste for it. There are still a lot of good things about it, not least of which is that it won’t cost me anything to come back if I so please. I’d certainly be much more pleased to if the current tack away from cosmetic goals and towards power grind is reversed. The new MF is a huge improvement that elegantly solves a longstanding problem while providing a harmless yet addictive number to give some sense of progression. Ascended weapons are a problem more virulent yet than MF ever was. I hope that Arenanet can reverse tack on this poor decision, as they did on that one. Until then, the game has broken its promises and its legacy, and I have better things to play.