The old class system was trash. On a purely conceptual level, sure, it might have been fun if they had put like two more years into developing it. In practice, you could just equip every overpowered ability and only a couple skills were class locked. Basically the shield skills were pretty good and Thaumaturgy was completely broken overpowered. I'm talking nearly immune to damage while also dealing the most DPS overpowered.

They might have been able to save the system with some heavy reworking of it (starting with stat requirements for equipping skills/traits so you could't just equip all the best stuff), but it wasn't really worth saving.