The whole respecing whenever you want is stuipid if you are going to have a continuous character, however, people also realize at times they got screwed over especially after academy when they had no idea what in the heck they were doing and how in detail they have to read all the skills. So I am going to list what I think would be a great way for respecs to be like.

-free respec at 5m skill points (enough time for a player to get out of academy play around a little realize they f-ed up and respec)
-free respec at player 3 month play time (After 3 months you realize how many more mistakes you made and very thankfully for this)
-free respec when CCP decides they have switched enough things around to deserve one.

-Can pay for respec every 6 months, can only respec once during the six month period, excluding the free respects. (This would allow for people who just have to have the respec get what they wish for, however, they can't get it unless they wait long enough for it. This would make people hopefully be very careful with how they respec knowing that if they just do FOTM, they will be stuck that way even when the FOTM ends and they just paid for it.

I think this would be a fair and balanced system, where the newb is catered to for the mistakes they are going to make, so they don't feel they have to restart their char entirely. For the people willing to pay for the respec, this makes it so that they can not just choose the FOTM every new month, that this is a paid for second chance to get their skills right, where you could only do it 2 times per year max.

The "spirit of the game" thus far, at least through my eyes, has been waiting arbitrary lengths of time for things to happen, or paying lots of money to halve it. Whether its waiting months for your passive SP + capped active SP (which takes only about an hour a day) to reach several hundred thousand to gain a single percentage in some stat, months for an update, or whatnot.

Not that that's a good thing.