I don't at all think these changes are "dumbing down" the game. As several have stated here and elsewhere, the sheer complexity of the former iteration was prohibitive to say the least. Before patch 13, there were literally tens of thousands of ways runes and skills could be swapped, not to mention a dearth of activity when leveling past 30. This new system addresses both of these issues quite nicely.
My one big concern is the same as many others, which is the proliferation of "cookie cutter" builds. Unfortunately there's no way in beta to really tell if the rune you unlock at a later level is always going to simply be better than the ones you had already. I really hope in nightmare/hell/inferno that we see dynamic increasing of rune effectiveness across the board by level, to allow all five runes for any given skill to be viable in various builds. If this is not the case, then we're going to end up with only a handful of builds at 60, and that would be a serious blow to this title's quality.
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My one big concern is the same as many others, which is the proliferation of "cookie cutter" builds. Unfortunately there's no way in beta to really tell if the rune you unlock at a later level is always going to simply be better than the ones you had already. I really hope in nightmare/hell/inferno that we see dynamic increasing of rune effectiveness across the board by level, to allow all five runes for any given skill to be viable in various builds. If this is not the case, then we're going to end up with only a handful of builds at 60, and that would be a serious blow to this title's quality.