These characters are a bit on rails aren't they?

Welcome to poe2.

Druid is the first class where I actually felt like there were archetypes in the game. With the other classes it's less noticeable and you can get super creative with it.

Druid just doesn't have enough skills for people that want to play either Bear, Werewolf, or Wyvern only.

You can definitely weapon swap, I made a rolling magma explosive spear build but it felt like I just nerfed myself as I could clear 10 times faster if I just went the standard Wyvern build.

You do have a weappn swap for other skills

Not at all. Super early game maybe, but as you play the opposite is true. Werewolf is built as a type of weapon skill, so it’s tied to a weapon, but that’s no different than bow skills tied to using a bow.

This is especially bad with the shapeshift forms but most other builds in the game are not as cut and dry. They really need to treat each form like it's own weapon type and give each a full suite of skills to choose from like you have with every other archetype. I think they wanted people to interchange the forms to gain that variety, but no one really wants to actually do that. If you want to play a bear, you dont want to use the other forms abilities most of the time. I would suggest trying some other archetypes(i really enjoy quarterstave builds) to see if they are more to your liking. Also, dont limit yourself by only playing the classes that thematically match the archetype you are playing. For example, thematically the monk makes the most sense to play with quarterstaff skills, but there are a ton of really interesting and powerful things you can do with other classes instead. Otherwise, you could also try poe1 which has a much higher level of skill variety since most skills in the game are designed to stand on there own instead of being part of a combo.