Nope, because you've got the winding path to pick up the combat talents, or the straight path that takes you right to Natural Rogue and straight across to Dedication.

That pales in comparison to the choices presented by every other talent tree.

I'm just curious, does anyone else find the single winding path thing actually kind of annoying. I don't have a problem with the skills, or the talents, but man, its like, "if you take this specialization, you can follow a straight line from one of two directions". It makes for the most boring choices and anyone who takes the tree is probably going to have such similar talents from it.

It would bug me more if it was a crappy winding path. I'd say Knockdown is the least attractive, but having that with a Melee attack isn't the most awful of Talents, I don't feel robbed like I do with ranks of Hidden Storage. The rest of the path is solid, gotta have more Strain, gotta, Improved Stunning Blow is fantastic, Stunning Blow is a little less inspiring as you can just use a Force Pike. Nothing awful though.

Actually, being stealthy isn't the only way to get into places you're not supposed to be in.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BavarianFireDrill

Deception and Skulduggery can go a long way towards infiltrating a place, perhaps even far more than just the ability to avoid being seen. Michael Westin of Burn Notice uses that particularly tactic quite a bit, and even Han and Luke tried it in ANH (sadly they underestimated the power of the Imperial bureaucracy). Often times one of the best hiding places is in plain sight, and if you can pass yourself as somebody that's supposed to be in a restricted location (Deception for the disguise and personal, Skulduggery for the falsified identification), that makes infiltrating it a whole lot easier than trying to sneak around every single measure that's in place to stop unwanted interlopers. After all, it's much easier to get to that secured data storage room when the security measures think that you're supposed to be there in the first place.

The Melee skill and combat talents are for the times when somebody gets too suspicious and you need to take them down/out in a hurry.

Exactly, Dono.

Considering that the other 2 Spy specs have boosts to stealth and B&E attempts, I was expecting some Deception boosts in Infiltrator to be the undercover agent, or Face man. Instead, it looks like crossing over to Ambassador is the way to pull that off (within AoR only).

One of my players dubbed it the "Brock Samson" class.

Not sure if that was the intent, but made sense to me

As far as I'm concerned, the "Infiltrator" specialization hit the nail on the head. Totally nailed the skills, talents progressions, and fluff.

It's a specialization of the Spy career. Note it doesn't say "Super-Spy." It says Infiltrator. Got some kick ass, got some stealth. Certainly these are useful tools for a super-spy, but like all specializations, this one fits a niche and fills it very well.

That pales in comparison to the choices presented by every other talent tree.

You mean like the Slicer that forces a player up a straight line path before they can even hope to branch out into other talents? Or the Heavy in Dangerous Covenants that literally has a single path to reach the Row 5 talents. Or Commodore, where each talent column is it's own path with no real chance of intermingling unless you start at the very top or very bottom of that column?

Not every specialization is going to tightly cleave to the "two main fleshed-out paths" approach. Some of them are going to be a good deal linear, as is the case with Infiltrator. And as 2P51 said, the bulk of those "winding path" talents are pretty good ones for someone that wants to play a combat-capable spy. And if all they really want are those sneaky-sneak talents, then they've got a straight shot from Row 1 to Row 5, then another 75 XP to pick up Dedication, after which they can pretty much ignore the rest of the tree if they so desire.

Ok, every other is an exaggeration. I don't like talent trees that don't give a lot of options. Iniltrator gives you 2 options pretty much. Slicer at least once you get to Defensive slicing opens WAY up to allow a bunch of different options. The Heavy also, as you fail to mention, has a lot of single branch off talents that are optional along the way.

The Infiltrator is "Do you want to run down the winding path, or run down the straight path" and that is all the options you have.