The four sets of Three favarit skills thing seems counter productive...

Either way either this way or the old way you still have to pause and fiddle around with a wheel of some sort. at least this way you will get access to more powers.

Generally speaking you're going to have that one power set that you use 90% of the time, unless you're playing on the hardest difficulty.

I don't like it, with 4 profiles like that you can have a good skill combo for every situation. You can switch from long range to brutal melee guy to tech master, in the same fight. And you can bet we'll have "optimal" builds online within a few days of release, and pretty much everyone is gonna end up playing similar jack-of-all-trade Ryders.

I might be alone in this, but I prefer it that way, honestly.

Ian has several times confirmed that you can indeed do this. Only console players will need to bother with menus, it seems. 

This is definitely a concern in my opinion, as well. Even with Favorite-swapping triggering a global cooldown, you still have access to a pretty wide assortment of powers and Profiles. Profiles themselves grant a bonus power, evolve it, and grant passives. This adds up to a lot of versatility. Insanity seems likely to be a cakewalk, again, once system proficiency is attained.

This is the way I interpreted it as well. I love the look of the new system, it seems like we'll be able to be a lot more versatile.

Presumably this is only possible after you've leveled enough to make your jack of all trades class, and I doubt that that's going to come incredibly quick. I also don't see the problem with optimal builds. There's nothing forcing you to use them, let alone seek them out in the first place. Optimal playstyles will probably be necessary only on Insanity (if that), and that's no different from the previous trilogy. I seem to recall Adepts being the more difficult class to do Insanity runs.

Ultimately, the point of the profile system is to encourage players to do exactly what they want and nothing they don't. Somehow, I suspect that we'll be seeing players mainline different abilities according to their preferences in spite of the optimal builds. Even if we do all end up playing the same everyman Ryder by coincidence, does it even matter if we're having fun?

I have a sneaking suspicion that trying to diversify, early on at least, will be a Bad Idea^tm. It looks like the more you specialize, the more benefit you gain from any particular profile. Spreading your skill points too thin too early could leave you a little underpowered by early-midgame or so. Obviously, I'm speculating here, but I kinda hope that there's some incentive to specialize at least a bit until you gain enough points to start making diversification more viable.

Not that it will likely matter TOO much, given the difficulty levels the original trilogy came with (Insanity wasn't really HARD, most of the time, just a chore, for me at least).