One other thing most "horizontal progression" advocates fail to consider is that in a numbers game, there will always be a best choice. Always. Period. You can have all the choices you want but one will always be mathematically proven to be superior (even if it's by a trivial amount) to the others, hence "cookie-cutter builds." The best you can hope for is to have different playstyles (e.g. crit vs. SS) reach that same maximum but there's only so far you can go with that.