It was in the early Alpha build, long before ATs were on the board. You could pick any power, target body parts (hinder movement by hitting legs, etc), and powers behaved a lot differently (claws was a toggle that gave your attacks extra damage).
It was scrapped due to worries over people picking only healing powers and such and gimping themselves.
This is my recollection and understanding as well. There was big concern that players would possibly end up with
completely useless characters.
By the time open beta occurred, that was all gone and the AT's were fundamentally as they were at live release.
A part of the issue (iirc) was also the lack of numbers to quantify powers. Instead, only vague decriptions were shown,
and frequently, they were inaccurate and inconsistent as well.
Even after release, those descriptions persisted, so it would have been even worse if you could take *any* power.
As it was, there were still plenty of folks that took ALL the travel powers, or went Pool Power crazy. While that didn't
make the characters useless, it certainly did reduce their effectiveness in many cases.
Regards,
4