It seems to me that the complaint is really about having to read. Imho the more game information you can gather, the better. Whether it be skill descriptions, lore or simple stats. No one forces you to read each line. It does not take much skill to find what you want from the descriptions.

I would understand if this was a request for a verbose and terse versions of the skills and stats but don't hold your breath. (Sounds like an addon right?)

I'm curious as to how you arrived at the conclusion that ToME has reached a saturation point where new players give up. I assume there is anecdotal evidence involved, but I'm not clear as to the process you're describing. A plethora of choices and options (of which you can only take advantage of two at a time, race and class) somehow affects the ability of new players to learn? If anything -- and I'm speaking anecdotally and deductively -- the complex options available make it *easier* for new players. Temporal mage too difficult for you to manage? Switch to bulwark, or the relative simplicity of an alchemist. Frustrated by the lack of ranged attacks to help keep you safe until you can work out the nuances of combat? Try an archer or archmage. Struggling to deal with hordes of enemies? Try a summoner or necromancer to create allies. And so forth. The process of trial-and-error is always going to remain in an RPG -- it's not a linear rail-shooter where you just have to let the plot carry you along. And "ideal" builds are going to vary greatly between players. Do you concentrate on shadows and ranged magic with a necromancer, or on undead summoning and avoidance? One-handed weapons and off-weapon or two-handed weapons for a beserker? Stealth and surprise, or straight-up confrontation with a emphasis on avoidance for a rogue? And so forth. Theory-crafting is done as much through personal preference and experience as it is through, well, theory. A better approach, I think, would be to post your own ideas about what does and doesn't work on the forum or wiki if you want to help people who'd rather learn from the experiences of others than surf the learning curve themselves.

Personally, I think it's just preference. You're playing for whatever reason, and you find sticking to a few tried-and-true classes fulfilling. Others are intrigued by the variety of choices available to them. Either way, a new player will have to invest *some* effort into the game. If s/he has no desire to do so, perhaps ToME -- and rogue-likes in general -- simply isn't the best choice for him or her, even with the suggestion of the creators telling them exactly what to do.

I disagree with you wholeheartedly.
One of the main reasons ToME is such a great game is the amount of depth it provides, we have that depth thanks to all the classes/races and their skills,
and the ability to build in more than one way just adds to that. Multiple choices are a good thing, if everything is streamlined and simplified we'd end up with something bland and boring, with no replayability. A lot of people are going to disagree with me on this probably, but there's a lot of roguelikes out there where your choices are few and far between with barely any choices between classes, or where every skill is a passive and races/classes hardly matter other than having x or y passive, this has 0 charm to me since everything feels samey and that's both boring and uncreative aside from roleplay value which honestly dies off after a while. One of the reasons I've been able to spend so much time in ToME is because of its wide array of skills of all types.

I've always been reluctant to listen to people who feel the need to shove WoW into everything, because WoW both has nothing to do with ToME nor should be taken as a standard for everything. I don't think anyone should be able to just pick up something new and excel in it right away, I'm sure this is true for WoW as well. These things require some thought and experience to grab ahold of generally, and this is fine, otherwise you should probably be looking for simpler incarnations of the genre or a different genre altogether, but to each their own I guess.

I honestly don't feel like going through all the new skills at times, but I think it's either just me being lazy or not being all that interested in the class to begin with, but more often than not it's worth checking things out and learning them, specially the newer classes which keep getting more and more fun.
As far as the "default build" thing goes, I'm fairly sure something like that was in the process of being implemented or thought about at some point in the recent past so you may want to look into that and the people involved/interested.

We try to keep new players in mind. Not overloading them with too many class choices is part of the reason most classes, especially the more complicated ones, start out locked. It's also why Archmages have four talent trees you have to unlock.

We also use locked trees as a way to ease players into a class. The new Paradox Mage has five unlocked class trees (20 talents) and four locked (16 more). That's 36 talents. Three of these class trees they share with Temporal Wardens, which cuts down on how much learning a new player has to do.

They also have four generic trees. Again three of these they share with Temporal Wardens and one starts out locked.

Talent descriptions are also something I keep in mind while writing as well as designing new talents. There's only so much information most people can parse before their attention starts to drift.

Maybe for 1.4 I'll rewrite and retune solipsists so the talent descriptions don't crit new players for 10,000 damage. In the meantime I have 100 other things I'd love to work on and only so much time I can spend on the computer each day. I'm sure Darkgod and the other contributors feel the same way.