Do you consider maneuvers to be spells? Assuming not, I would put your Paladin against a Warblade. Maybe 2 Paladins against a Warblade.
I suspect that people who say Paladins are fine as is are playing with older (say 35+) players like myself. People who have a history in 1E remember the days when the classes were more balanced and there was a lot less optimization (the latter being the pre-internet days). We tend to continue to play the classes as we did back then, with Wizard types staying mainly in the back and casting direct damage and clerics soaking up attacks and healing people. I think seeing an even somewhat optimized group of Cleric, Druid, Wizard, Sorcerer would be truely eye-opening. In fact, I would like to see it - although I think I am decent at envisioning it.
It's not that much fun to see. It's to the point now that if anyone who has been playing for more than a year says they're gonna build a Druid I roll my eyes and try to avoid them.
From the POV of a single class Fighter (or any melee class):
Maximized Clerics are fine. They perform somewhat similar to Fighters, sometimes with more powerful attacks if they go "nova", sometimes less powerful if they don't or are low on spells (encounters per day being high can really even the playing field no matter what anyone says). They also get some cool in-combat and pre-combat spells for buffing and damage and if they share a few they're fun to fight alongside with. They don't, however, get to do some of the cool stuff that requires tons of feat chains that Fighters get to do. From a simple melee standpoint they're about even with a Fighter depending on the situation, but from an out of combat usefulness standpoint then yeah they got Fighters beat by a longshot.
Maximized Wizards are cool because they control the battlefield in your favor and chances are they'll throw out Haste or something similar to buff you up and make you do your job better.
Maximized Druids (or any Druids for that matter) are where it gets annoying. I've found most seasoned players who play Druids try to be a single-person-party and the annoying thing is they can actually do that well and they aren't shy about pointing it out to everyone. That's just been my experience interacting with those players, though. Like, their train of thought is almost that of "because I can cause more damage, the Fighter SHOULDN'T be allowed to cause damage at all so I'm gonna do whatever I can to make him look obsolete".
We've really had some bad experiences with Druids in our group. Ugh, the horror. The class is banned almost entirely for seasoned players, and for noob players we limit summoned creatures to one at a time (that goes for any summoning) just because it's
ing annoying to have the battelfield covered in crap and the summoner taking 30 minutes on his turn in combat.
As for the other question about ToB stances etc. being considered spells... I don't know, they're kinda like spells but I only really know enough about them to know that I don't like them.
