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Are themes the only method of acquiring feats now? That seems a pretty devastating hamstring to character customization. I know there has been some talk of players designing their own themes, but what will that look like? Does that mean that they can just choose whatever feats they want? If so, why even have themes? Also, the theme feats seem to replicate class features found in earlier editions. The upshot of this is that players have less feats to spend tweaking and customizing their character, because they must spend all the feats they have just to function effectively. I like most of what I've read, but this looks like a big step back to me. 

The character creation rules haven't been released yet, so we shouldn't get fired up about what we don't yet know. Now, with that said, I was under the impression (from various articles and interviews) that they plan on giving players the option to either pick a theme (and get the associated feats from that theme) or just choose which feats they want. Themes have the advantage of providing players and groups who don't want excessive complexity the option of just letting the game recommend for them.