Yaha. 4e had massive class list, but it was the story and what the players did with their characters that made things interesting.
Im all for minimal classes (the classic 4) with themes/backgrounds giving us the ability to color them in a little.
To me, offs-shoots like the ranger,paladin,bard yada yada come across just as "pre-packaged" builds, so if someone wanted to play one of those, perhaps have a chapter devoted to pre-packaged background/theme/class combination to streamline for casual players. So if you want to play a ranger? Well, here is how you put a ranger together.
Then let the micro-managers ignore that chapter and let them do their own thing (kinda like a "design your own class" approach)
I'm against a reductionism in the number of classes that would kill viable character concepts. A Bard is a performer with some arcane power, vast know how and decent martial training, beyond that he/she could be anything (an explorer, a combat medic, an ilussionist, a wandering minstrel, a warrior poet, an actor that moonlights as an asassin, a somewhat mad noble, a juggler, a gypsy, a bar waitress, a drunken brawler, a divinely inspired poet such as Orpheus), I wouldn't even know how to express it as a subclass of rogue-fighter-cleric-wizard and I would lament if I had to use six or seven levels of multiclassing just to get one.
And I'm sure that players that play lots of rangers, barbarians warlocks and druids will say similar things regarding their favorite classes. Now we know what the customization tools will be in next (theme and background) if we have to use those just to get the standard class we want to play "as is", then we have lost the chance to use them to better describe our characters and that way all bards will have the same exact 5 feats and skills with the same exact flavor, as all the barbarians, all the druids, all the sorcerers all warlocks, etc. In contrast every character of the big 4 gets free to be anything they want and still keep their class label and mechanics.
Why can one player have a fighter (noble/slayer) or fighter (scholar/hunter) and meanwhile other being stuck with fighter(savage/berseker) when he would have wanted to play a Barbarian (noble/lurker) and be Conan?
All core classes beyond the big 4 encompass a diverse enough bunch of different character concepts to be defined as simply a particular theme/background combination, it could be argued that Monks and Paladins have an extremely narrow flavor, but I think that any dedicated player could prove otherwise. Just because the stereotypical exemplar of a given class could be easilly described as a multiclass/hybrid of one or more of the big 4 with a given theme/background doesn't mean all members of that class are accurately described by the same token. Don't underestimate and punish those that like classes beyond fighter-rogue-wizard-cleric!.
