Why are you talking about GWM and SS?
Your post that started this thread did not stipulate the exclusion of feats. But are Fighting Styles off the table then? You keep shifting the goal posts, so it is unclear what you are really arguing for.
Even without feats, Fighting Styles create the separation between 2H, Ranged, TWF, and 1H (in roughly that order depending on the tier).
To answer your thread's question: Is ranged better than melee? The answer is both simple and complicated. Ranged is always better until it isn't. It is that simple. In the rules as written, it is so dependent upon the scenario and the opposition, that you cannot create a general case for it.
At higher tiers when opponents can teleport at will, ranged really becomes iffy as a strategy since maintaining range is almost impossible. In lower tiers range is much easier to maintain. But opponents that can fly, earthglide, go ethereal, have high movement speeds, have ranged attacks themselves, spell snipers, etc. can play havoc on a ranged strategy.
For example, I ran a game about a year ago with all 20th level characters. They were facing a bunch of devils and a tarrasque. Everyone had the ability to fly as well. None of the characters were able to maintain range and feats like Polearm Master and Sentinel were useless. In that battle the "ranged" attack that dominated was Magic Missile. The fighters with action surge, 2H weapons, and GWM were the largest damage dealers followed by the wizards and sorcerers. The bow wielding characters' main contribution was their hit points and taking attack pressure off the other characters.
So again the answer is that range is better until it isn't.
My players are about to enter a situation (the are 3rd level) in which ranged looks really good -- a room full of skeletons that cannot leave it. However, they skeletons all regenerate and cannot be killed unless someone actually goes into the room and disables some devices. There are too many skeletons (twelve) for them to just keep pounding on them from outside the room with ranged attacks. Since the skeletons also have shortbows it makes a purely ranged battle a losing strategy. Since the skeletons are around a large pit, shoving and grappling become a viable strategy.
I also make my players keep track of ammunition (something I don't think has be mentioned as a downside to ranged) and they only have about 60 rounds of ammo between them because they just survived a shipwreck. A ranged battle with the skeletons will quickly deplete that.
As a DM I try to create situations in which every character choice has a chance to shine -- ranged, melee (twf, 2h, 1h, etc), spells, and just character problem solving.
Ranged IMHO, only really has a chance to shine if playing with a "grid" and "miniatures" (we use Roll20). When playing in "the theater of the mind", like Chris Perkins' games on
Dice, Camera, Action, ranged loses much of its nuance.
Otherwise, the only way to compare them is through looking at Damage per Round. I created a spreadsheet to do that for all of the different scenarios (including with and without feats) at all target ACs. That discussion was in the other thread about TWF a few weeks ago. The conclusion was ranged is good at dealing damage, but not a good as 2H, again depending on the tier.
