Apologies in advance if I screw up any quote tags…
of course I can’t xp VB either. cussgrumblecuss clearly the rule on recent xp is flawed - stupid arbitrary website 
Impossible? No. Unlikely? Yes. Class systems make change and growth difficult. And, one might argue, it ought to be. Predetermination is a theme in fantasy fiction. Biological predetermination is a theme of real life. The game just follows our preexisting observations to the effect that people don't change much.
Class systems make change of mechanics difficult. They do not prevent the Dwarf who started off detesting elves from developing a respect for the Elf in the party, or even the race as a whole, over the course of the campaign as a consequence of his experiences with Elves. No, not even if he’s a Ranger whose first Favoured Enemy was elves.
None of those things sound like changes that would have particularly salient mechanical representations.
Neither does that Dilettante Artist turning his social skills to raising a peasant army to overthrow the King and turn the nation into a democracy after campaign events persuade him of the injustice of the current system, even when he started as an aristocrat who supported that system, nor the Barbarian becoming sickened by killing and giving up his dreams of being a warlord in favour of seeking a peaceful existence.
Does that matter? A player who signs up to play a three foot tall fighter is almost certainly not doing so with the expectation that his overall combat effectiveness will be equivalent to that of a medium sized character. Why fix something that isn't broken?
“Broken”, ironically, is the term the gaming community adopts to describe “overpowered as compared to the other choices”. It is your opinion that the player does not wish to play a 3 foot tall warrior who is, like many smaller characters in fiction, as or more competent in combat, in his own style, as any larger warrior.
Deviating from Fantasy for a moment, does Wolverine’s player mean, when he notes he’s short, that he wants to suck at combat, or that he wants to defy that expectation?
Exactly. The number of people who laugh at a bard trying to adventure alongside a barbarian is probably large.
I think your group's bullying of other players is clouding your perception heavily.
The number of people who acknowledge that some classes should be better or worse at adventuring than others is likely pretty much everyone. The number of people who will complain if a halfling dervish is whirling through combat just as effectively as a character twice his size is likely pretty much everyone.
No. But I like your determination in stating your opinions as if they were facts.
The number of people who have a meaningful in-game problem because of one macro-level mechanical choice being slightly better or worse than another? Miniscule. That's for the charop boards.
Again, I believe your opinion is flawed.
To VB’s comments (and I snipped his excellent points on why he values character balance), I note that, on all of these issues, there seem to be a lot of posters who don’t agree that balance is not worth pursuing, much less that its pursuit would actually be detrimental. I think those who want balance outnumber those who oppose it (but I am biased to believe so, and I did not do any kind of a count). While I don’t find a message board the perfect random sample, I think it’s far superior to “me and the 3 guys I’ve gamed with for many years”, or even “all the gamers at my local game store”. And I see VB caught that as well…
The "larger audience" of course being your small home group, gotcha. I'd rather the game be more open to the real "larger audience" and let your group continue to mock your "friends" (not that I'd call someone that who constantly mocked my choices) for their ridiculous choices.
I’ll try to refrain from noting that group seems to have fallen from, what, eight or ten players (when Ahnehnois saw the occasional Bard) to three. Oops…guess I didn’t try hard enough… J
I take a bevy of complaints every week about applying real laws of physics to the game, genre conventions and stereotypes built into mechanics, interpersonal and character-specific issues, and a variety of other things that have nothing to do with the balance of those mechanics.
You mean like how the cube/square law means giants can’t exist, the aerodynamics of a giant wasp or the fact that many “two handed weapons” were largely designed for mounted use (using the horse’s speed, not one’s own arms, to deliver momentum) or for use in large formations, and generally suck for one man combat use? I find most gamers who complain about such issues are very selective in which real world physics issues bug them.
By the way, isn’t your classification of Bards a stereotype? I’d say “yes”.
In general, the more open-ended the mechanics, the faster they play. A DM who says "roll a Knowledge check" and sets a DC arbitrarily in his head resolves the check much faster than one who checks a series of rules to determine the DC.
All other things being equal, all other things tend not to be equal. This may speed play or slow it down, as the GM agonizes over an appropriate DC, and/or is challenged by the other players on his choice. After all, we want to apply real world standards, right? Really, that knowledge should be much more/less common than your arbitrary DC indicates.
A character built using open-ended skills (like what 13th Age does with backgrounds) is built much more easily than one that requires researching and comparing all relevant skill options. PF's combat maneuver system plays a lot faster than magic (or its ilk) because you simply decide what you're trying, roll a die, and let the DM tell you what happens. Not as "balanced", but easier and faster.
Or, again, slower as we debate which skill(s) ought, or ought not, to be applicable in the given situation and, again, whether the GM’s statement of what happens matches with real world physics, genre conventions, past rulings, etc. etc. etc. rather than just using the very specific rule as it is written and not arguing about it.
