Or imagine gear just had attribute points (item budget) which you could spend on stats as you like. Obviously this would invalidate stat sets (pseudo content) entirely and stat swapping on legendary gear, too. But why not let the majority of players enjoy the build craft meta game instead of just a tiny fraction which has full legendary gear, runes and sigils?
I mean with a large enough set of (Viper, Celestial, Marauder, Berrserker/Assassin) account bound armor, weapons and trinkets (maybe a few legendary ones) you can mix and match the optimal stat set for pretty much any open world build anyway. But it is very tedious and no fun.
This would definitely be a drastic change, that would invalidate alot of things. I would rather see this as a concept for a potential gw3 .
The GW1 system was still very different from what you described. You could spend points on skill groups, rather than increasing raw damage or crit chance.