Griffith Dragonlake said:
All very interesting ideas but . . . they are in conflict with the RAW!
Ahem, the RAW isn't everything.
The rules of D&D are meant to help depict adventurers in a fantasy world, and the world that the adventurers encounter, especially the things they do that challenge them and make their lives interesting. The further you move from that model, the less sense that the RAW will make. If you push the demographics, economics, or any other part of the rules for depicting a D&D world too far they won't hold up, because the D&D RAW (or any RAW) is not an absolutely perfect modelling of reality (sorry).
The rules are there to help depict the setting of the game, the setting isn't there to help depict what the rules say. In a normal D&D setting, the vast majority of people are poor commoners who are barely literate (they might be literate for rules purposes, but they aren't exactly going to be reading fine literature), because the society and economics of the world means that most people can't afford magical training, magical organizations don't have huge open enrollment public magic schools.
Why not say that in d20 Modern, why doesn't everybody go to college and become doctors and get the Surgery feat and lots of ranks of Treat Injury and Knowledge (Earth & Life Sciences), or Lawyers and get lots of ranks in Diplomacy and Knowledge (Civics), because there is no rule against it, and being a doctor is such a good profession. The RAW doesn't take things like this into account, because it normally assumes you're using the rules to depict a setting you have in mind, not sitting down with the RAW and trying to come up with a world based entirely off extrapolating if those exact rules applied very literally to every single person on the planet.
The intricacies of career selection of commoners and motivational career psychology of NPC's isn't exactly a part of the RAW because it's not relevant at all to 99% of D&D games. When in a typical D&D game is an adventuring party going to stop in a town, stop by a commoner, and lecture him that he should have been an expert since it's a better class in every way, or should have been an adept so he could use magic? Okay, I can see that as a OotS comic as a rules joke, but not in a normal campaign.