But I didn't say fighters with garbage physical stats or wizards with poor Intelligence, I mentioned fighters with high Intelligence or wizards with high Strength.
So a character with a good score in what would normally be considered the dump stat for a particular class.
A "quirky" high stat like that is much more likely if a player can roll it randomly rather than having to pay for it out of a pool of points they could spend elsewhere.
...but you
won't see that unless the player rolls well. Because their good rolls will go to the stats that have the most value.
A typical rolled Fighter
won't have high Intelligence
unless the rules force them to (strict rolling)
or they're quite lucky (e.g.
several 14+ stats.) And the reason for that is exactly what I said.
You say it is "much more likely," but you need to already be in rarefied company to have the
potential. A Fighter is going to put their first high stat in Strength or Dex, depending on which they rely on most, and the second into Con. For a Str-based Fighter, high Dex is still compelling, but for a Dex-based one, high Str is of minimal value. So, for a Dex-based one, you're gonna need at least three good rolls to see high Int (or Cha or whatever) on a Fighter; for a Str-based one, you'll probably need
four such rolls. I'm not sure what you would consider a "high" stat, but even for pretty low standards thereof, people are only gonna hit that about one seventh of the time (e.g. rolling four 14+ stats.)
Conversely, I've known several players, including yours truly, who have no problem sinking 14 or more into "unimportant" stats
with point buy because it fits the concept of the character. This is especially true when the point buy is more generous, covers a broader spread of numbers, and the game overall offers ways to mitigate it...which is exactly what I've done in other games.
So yeah. I don't really buy the argument that you suddenly get this huge windfall of unexpectedly diverse and interesting characters. The vast majority will be just as "cookie-cutter" as what you're criticizing, and it really won't be
that much more likely that you'll see such "quirky" statted characters.