In absolutely none of your "counterpoints" did you at all remotely offer a single shred of evidence that it was better, easier or that you came closer to having as effective of a character taking a non-favored race/class combination in the previous editions than it is in the current edition.
All your offered was that you were much more willing to play a character who was just had a generally worse chance of passing 95% of the rolls they would make during the game session when you were younger. But apparently you have a huge problem with it now.
If you were willing to play a statistically worse character who would perform 10-20+% worse at everything they did as part of their class back then but now you feel compelled to make the most optimized possible character-- that's you who changed, not a matter of the rules changing.
The changes to the rules have in fact made it so that the gap between the worse race/class combination and the best race/class-- outside of using a few badly designed races from Volo's Guide-- is much smaller than the 10-20+% it used to be.
It was specifically a design goal in order to make all race/class combinations as close to a fair and even field as they could. And while they could have done a better job in a handful of cases, they are none-the-less closer to parity than they have been in any edition except maybe 4th.
You cannot blame the game system for your own personal attitudes changing from "I'll just throw this random junk together and I don't care if I am rolling at a -4 compared to if I had used the streamlined route" to "I must streamline my character to eek out every last +1". That is all entirely a reflection upon you and not the game system.
Those comments really are not very nice or useful to the discussion.
It is extremely useful to any discussion to shut down people making wholly fictitious claims. Using humor and ridicule are often the quickest ways to do so.
How precisely would you imagine that one could have a useful discussion starting with
"The racial attribute of
this edition make it too hard to play unusual race class combinations.
It was
so much easier to make unusual race/class combinations back when races not only had attribute bonuses, but also attribute penalties and classes literally shut you down from gaining class abilities and the best feats if your attributes weren't high enough.
And it was even easier to make an unusual race/class combination in the edition before that when not only were there attribute bonuses and penalties and having even one point higher in an attribute could grant a litany of benefits, but non-human races were out-and-out banned from taking any but 2 or 3 classes and had strict level restrictions in even those.
Why back in 1991 when Dwarfs weren't allowed to be Wizards, we saw SO many more Dwarf Wizards than now... pay no attention to all those Dwarf Wizard builds you see across these boards and Reddit."
There is no possible useful discussion to be had with a person who sincerely holds such beliefs. And it is so very difficult to believe that anyone actually sincerely holds such a beliefs that its kind of got to be a troll shitpost, right?
At the same time, such a "point" stand unchallenged lest someone come alone who doesn't know a thing about the situation and mistakenly take it on face value.
There is no useful "discussion" to be had regarding whether this edition is friendlier than 1st or 2nd towards people who would want to play unusual race/class discussions. The truth at the very face value, the conclusion one would come to simply by flipping through the character creation chapters is that AD&D was extraordinarily hostile towards anyone playing anything other than what the designers strictly prescribed and only wanted people to play particular races and particular classes-- they were even hostile towards people playing female characters and found it worthy of ridicule that anyone would desire to play any race that did not appear in Lord of the Rings, let alone think that the races could ever be capable of being any but the select handful of classes and only to the extent that the designers envisioned.
Meanwhle in the current edition the designers have done what they could in order to balance things out while still giving enough racial statistics to make the old schoolers happy. They might have gone even further towards making it so that every race could play every class-- but they were so shell-shocked at the reception of 4E and Pathfinder basically ripping off the whole game wholesale to capitalize on those rebelling customers who felt too much had changed that they were trying to make everything as much "return to 3rd Edition" as possible.
One could very well take the game, simply give everyone the Variant Human stats and say "Race has no effect on your abilities or statistics at all-- feel free to use your background and 1st level bonus feat, skill choices and any multiclassing you do to support the racial aspect of your character."
Of course people would throw a fit about that too even though it would be the most equitable way to allow people to play any race/class combination without any need for anyone to concern themselves about any bit of imbalance between the races. After all-- the races that used to be able to see in the dark will no longer have that written on their sheet and there will be no mechanical impact of being small size and Dwarfs won't have any resistance to magic or poison or whatever unless there is explicitly a feat that allows for that.
