Talents, A Fair Approach

Let's be fair. It is not impossible to offer different choices to players that are absolutely meaningful and equally efficient. In fact, Blizzard has done this before and they succeeded without even all that much effort.

Take the choice of your class. This choice is all about style and not at all about efficiency (except for a few hardcore raiders).
Blizzard even mostly succeeded with the choice of specc. Do you want to play an Arms Warrior or a Fury Warrior? Both are usually equally efficient in PvE; but it's already hard to make both equally efficient in PvP.

The difference between these choices and the talent trees is that these are very high-level choices. Shadow Priests play so dramatically different to Arms Warriors, that it's actually easy to make them have the same dps and survivability in a homogenized end game, without making them similar!

And that's really the problem with talents. They cannot make too much of a difference. A talent choice that dramatically changes your character would actually be easy to make all about style, and not about efficiency. But a choice between three ways of speeding up your movement doesn't change the style of your class enough to feel meaningful, if all three choices are equally efficient.

The point is this: If the choices cannot draw their meaning from their efficiency, they have to draw it from their style. For this effect to be sufficiently strong, the difference in style has to be sufficiently strong.

There's also a more interesting lesson to be learned here: If you want to add meaningful choices that are equally efficient, you have to start the iteration with radically different styles. Because if you start with similar styles, you will end up making them even more similar when adjusting them to be equally efficient.