I couldn't disagree more. I will concede that Essentials includes generally less-customizable class than did the early part of 4E, but I will argue heartily that this is a good thing, especially because Essentials does still allow for significant customization. (In short, I believe Essentials hit the sweet-spot in terms of class-customizability.)
If I'm reading your concerns correctly, Essentials most bugs you because you see it as a return to the bad-ol'-days of warrior- and rogue-types having only one basic combat option: "attack with sword". I can see why that would be worrisome; back in the day, not even so long ago, those classes were 1) boring to play, and 2) proved woefully inadequate against stronger, more magical enemies as the campaign progressed. Let me assure you, neither the Slayer nor Knight nor Thief nor Hunter nor Scout suffer these problems--and if they do, they certainly don't suffer them so acutely as their previous-edition forebears.
As you know, Essentials Martial classes have either At-Will "stances" or "tricks" that give them specific tactical advantages with either their movement, their basic attacks or both. Additionally, all of these classes gain Utility powers (mostly per encounter) that open up additional tactical advantages. In this way, while they make most of their attacks as basic attacks, they also have a significant number of tactical options available to them in every situation, and because these classes also scale with other 4E classes, they never become combat-irrelevant the way a 3E or AD&D Fighter would. It also saves one the trouble of wondering how many different ways there are to swing a sword, and why you can only swing it some way once per day. (Presumably it has something to do with pulling a muscle in your shoulder.
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"But that's not enough!" you might say. Well, here's where I'll have to admit that my next opinion is probably much more controversial:[sblock]I believe that pre-Essentials 4E, and 3E/3.5E before it, had too many options. I believe that 3E's uber-modular design (perhaps more reminiscent of GURPS than D&D) spoiled us with options, many of which turned out to be sub-optimal. As a result of this decade-old development, the number of options available to a given character (feats, spells, etc.) is paralytically broad and often rife with redundancies, slowing the game down as players search each book to try to remember exactly what each note on their character sheet means. Perhaps more dire, it also created the Character Optimization phenomena, including the tendency of players to retrain/redesign their characters as soon as they learn "the right way to have made their character." In my opinion, the optimization mindset robs each character of the personalization each player invests in it by designing it himself or herself, creates two tiers of characters (optimized and crap), and ultimately reduces viable options within the game as each option becomes named as either "useless" or "too awesome not to have."
D&D and AD&D prior to 3E didn't have the same culture of optimization that modern editions do. In part, this is because of more limited gaming infrastructure--access to messageboards, especially--prior to 2000. More importantly though, I believe this lack of optimization was also due to the less-modular nature of those games; since players had dramatically fewer options, they had far fewer opportunities to optimize or hamstring their characters, and thus didn't spend any time worrying about doing so. (To be overly simplistic, since players had almost no choice about their characters' development, all Fighters, for example, were therefore equally optimized insofar as anything the player could change.) In short, more choices leaves players with more ways to break the game, which is anathema to fun in the long run.[/sblock]I believe that class design in Essentials achieves an ideal balance between character options and role reliability. I also believe it provides the most playable-yet-true-to-style examples of classic AD&D classes in quite a while. In contrast, while giving everyone powers in 4E was a great experiment in the development of D&D, it kinda washed away a lot of the D&D flavour by, in a way, making everybody into a different kind of Wizard; Essentials preserves the balance of 4E but takes us back towards the "essential" D&D flavour of 1E AD&D, which I think is a brilliant sign for the future.
I really think HoS is a whole separate can of worms from Essentials. It's obviously modeled after Essentials, but it's not designed with the same thoroughness that I find the Essentials classes have, and I think the Vampire is an excellent example of this.
