I have no idea what "Console" has to do with anything....

The profession system is the reason SWG failed.   You try to make a game with infinite posibilitys and you will find people figuring out Infinitly many exploits.   Also, allowing people to mix and match profesions basicaly says, "We are not gunna even try to balance anything" as there will always be a specific combination of a abilitys that no one thought of before that will be broken.

Jedi became a Starting class because of the simple fact that ALPHA CLASSES DO NOT WORK IN MMOs, period.   The only possible way for them to work is if you make them have limited lifes.   As in you die and then your dead, no more alpha for you, get back to your original charicture.   That also doesnt work in a MMO as to many people get mad that all the work they put into it can be gone in one lag spike or disconect and they die.    You cant have one class being superior w/o any downside or limit on it, because otherwise everyone ends up being one.    If you include a class that can fight and win against them all the time to balance then you just end up with 2 classes being used all the time.   If you have multiple ones who can counter the alpha then whats the bloody point of an alpha?   That is what happened in SWG.    Jedi were the alpha, but people came up with templates to beat Jedi specificaly and thus Jedi became nothing more then a very hard to get to regular class that was a drain on resources to try and keep it strong w/o being to strong.   Since it was a base class anyway they moved it to a starting profesion as it should have been from the begining.   And now in SWG you see a equal number of most all classes, instead of the rediculus numbers of jedi that were in Pre-CU and CU (and yes early NGE).

Yes, it is a new game and you had the right to leave.   That goes along with what I said about the Horible way the changes were implimented.   However, just because something changed doesnt mean you shouldnt give it a chance.   You have free trials you can use on your account to reactivate it and try the new game.   I recomend doing so with New charictures.   Go thru the story and everything and learn how to play the new game.   Do not be totaly focused on how the game should be or was.   Think of it as a new Star Wars MMO and start from there.

They fixed that by adding in 2 unique expertise trees (talent trees) to each profesion and now a Beast Master (Creature Handler) expertise to all profesions.

That along with the new reverse engineering stuff, and the Extreamly indepth Beast Master system make no two charictures the same.

There is alot more variation now, where as preCU/NGE there was only a few templates that everyone would go for and everyone was in Composit armor and Everyone used about 4 different weapons.   You are MUCH better able to customize yourself now, while keeping ballance and effective in combat/crafting.