Apropos of the thread topic, I find the point raised that class imbalance is not, for most players, the big deal it can be to the "terminally online" crowd because it doesn't interfere with their realisation of their character concept (up until the point where it does, of course) to be very insightful. The neo-trad play of modern D&D just requires that characters can (a) feel awesome for their players to play and (b) fulfill the concept they desire (subject to the way that certain classes are more suitable for some concepts than others).
Again, this implies that there should never be player dissatisfaction from the "weaker" classes/subclasses, so long as the concept still appears. WotC's actual player satisfaction data proves that (a) people do keep playing these options but (b) their player satisfaction rating is low, often very low, sometimes less than 50%. (IIRC, Champion was specifically 54%, which if you account for margins of error, that's effectively the same as "people dislike it about as much as they like it.") Unless you think WotC is conducting bad surveys with faulty data, I don't see how it is possible to hold the "players really don't care at all about effectiveness, only concept." They DO care about concept! If they didn't, we wouldn't see so many of these underpowered classes and subclasses. But they also do care to at least some degree about effectiveness, which is why they keep playing things they're unhappy with.
Because it is complicated. Because playing something is not identical to loving it. Because you can love specific parts of something while hating or just not really liking other parts. Because it is possible to feel, intuitively, that something isn't quite right without knowing what exactly is wrong.
I'm not really speaking to
effectiveness in and of itself - rather, inter-class
balance. (And, to be sure, I do think a better-balanced D&D would be a better-designed D&D, as per
my remarks on another thread discussing a related topic.)
Contrary to your paraphrase ("players really don't care at all about effectiveness, only concept"), which I must point out is... not really related at all to what I wrote, I would expect that players who prioritise "realise a character concept that feels awesome in play" for their gameplay experience
actually are going to be concerned with effectiveness, and are, of necessity, going to be unsatisfied if a character class or subclass that intuitively seems like it
ought to be the correct choice for any given character concept is not up to the task. A character who is ineffective as a result of their subclass isn't going to feel very awesome in play, after all.
For instance, I expect, say, berserkers don't score poorly on player satisfaction surveys because clerics or druids or wizards have a wider breadth of capabilities. I expect they score poorly on such surveys because they can't even enable playing a berserker the way you would expect to play them - e.g. frenzying as often as possible and striking fear into the hearts of your enemies. (The berserker is notoriously terrible at that last option, being able to use an
entire action to
maybe make
one creature frightened of them.)
So while I would agree inter-class balance matters, and for good reason, there is a certain extent to which it only matters if it matters to the player base writ large.
