To be honest, there's no hint in any of the marketing material (gameplay, interviews etc) that suggests a different approach to progression than what we have. Even the 2018 demo had already level gated enemies and gear. The resistance mechanic is something already well spread in the RPG genre and is present (superficially, like 99% of the game mechanics in cp77) here as well. But they decided to have it that way probably because they wanted the "play as you want/mix and match" design. You can't have them both easily in a game. As I always say, less is more sometimes. I personally prefer the "fluid class system" to the resistance based design in aRPG, and I would have walked the extra mile and completely cut all stats leaving the progression bound to cyberware, meaning choices of the abilities (and therefore builds) you can have. Something like Prey from Arkane (as I said many times prior to release, so my mind hasn't changed). This is already in the game, obviously, it is just less important than it could have been because of the stats scaling with level which is the main pillar of the progression system. The rest revolves around it to the point of being just flavour, also because the game has way too many skills unlocked via levelling that, at level 50, make you able to do pretty much everything: crafting is completely useless because of the loot system, you can have 20 blades, 20 netrunning, 15-ish in body by mid/end game and do pretty much everything. A lower level cap could have solved this (let's say 30 instead of 50). Actually with 20 netrunning and a tech sniper rifle you're literally a god who can clear entire buildings from the other side of the street, but that's a problem with balancing and embarrassing AI. But that's a completely different problem.