Dades wrote on Apr 23, 2012, 00:19:
The problem with the rune system is that they came up with them a long time ago but didn't patch them in until beta 13. The game launches next month which hasn't really given them a lot of time to make the system deep and interesting. Right now most of the rune activations are either very situational or have an obvious upgrade path. The user interface for both it and the skill system is very clumsy and a big indicator of the problem that they tried to go back to the drawing board too close to release. It will change drastically and in fact already has a few times which makes defending their implementation a moot point.

Skill trees in Diablo 2 had some problems but eventually got patched into a very interesting mix of free form customization while still retaining synergies for people who wanted a linear path.