There are a lot of unknowns, but my initial impression is positive. Not because I hated the previous system, but the worst part was looking up what armor pieces had the skills needed, sockets, gems and charms doing like a 5 hour min max google fest to figure out what parts needed to be collected if the set worked. Allowing armor to be usable as you make each piece is also a better experience. Having to craft an entire new set before equipping it is a less good new player experience.
When he showed evade in the video it had five levels of potency, even though it took 15 points previously in evade to get a third level of potency. Negative skills are not really a huge loss, because no one would run around with a negative skill if they understood that -9 was nothing bad. By rebalancing points, and stretching out the scaling there should be a better feeling system with all the same difficulties of stacking certain combinations of abilities. I am not 100% certain, but I think if you think about all the armor skills as like a combinatorial problem, there should be a redesign to this system to maintain virtually all of the utility while making it just better feeling obvious and intuitive. Presentation and gradient of skills really only seems to be the new things here, and I think that this is just better.