Having now read through all of this a few things leap out to me:
1. I might be misinterpreting, and if so please carry on, but it seems most of the discussion here is in regard to super-high-level stuff - all the talk of Conan and Elric and Hercules - and thus has limited relevance to the vast majority of tables whose games just never get that high. And with that said, if really-high-level epic stuff is what a particular table is looking to play most of the time, is D&D the right system or should that table be looking at some sort of supers game?
In all editions the 'sweet spot' of play generally seems to be the low-mid to mid levels (roughly 3rd-9th in 1e-2e, 3rd-12th in 3e, maybe 4th-14th in 4e) - D&D has never really done really high-level play all that well, mostly IMO because the PCs just get too big for the setting/fiction. 3e's fix for this was to make the setting (i.e. monsters) scale with the PCs, leading to some ridiculous outcomes mostly ending with there should be no commoners left alive on the planet. 5e's much better fix is to greatly narrow the power grade between low and high level.
2. A fair way back in the thread there was talk - from [MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION] I think but I could be mistaken - about how the genre of play is expected to change by tier in 4e. To me this would be a bug, not a feature, as it represents a built-in reduction of the system's flexibility for running different types of campaigns and-or storylines. If for example I want to run a courtly-intrigue campaign - limited combat, lots of skill challenges, mortal foes - yet still has the PCs advance through the levels I'd probably be fighting the system most of the way to prevent the PCs from becoming godlike in the setting by 12th level.
Now one could quite legitimately say that maybe 4e thus wouldn't be the best system for such a campaign...but that's just my point. Every campaign type that a system is ill-suited for is going to reduce that system's overall usefulness, and thus popularity.
3. Following on from 2, above: one very common type of story / campaign that 4e couldn't do very well was a true zero-to-hero progression. Sure it got the hero end right, but in 4e even at 1st level you're already something of a hero with abilities far above those of the average commoner - the system just doesn't do the 'zero' end well at all. As zero-to-hero is one of the most common tropes out there (e.g. Rand-Egwene-Nynaeve in WoT started as pretty much commoners, and neither Bilbo nor Frodo had much going for them before their great adventures came along) I'd count this as a major miss in 4e design. It needed about 3 more levels between commoner and its original 1st level in order to make zero-to-hero work in any sort of plausible fashion; and while I suppose one could add those in, it's work the system shouldn't make us have to do.
Not saying 5e's much better in this regard, mind you.
The narrowed PC power grade still starts at a higher point than it should. 0-1-2-3e were better, however, in that a) there was much less gap between commoner and 1st level and b) one could easily add a 0th level and were even given guidance on how in 1e [in an adventure module] and 3e [tangentially, via the guidelines to start a dual-classed character at 0th-0th] to expand the 'zero' end if so desired.
4. There needs to be a 'simple' class in the game - no powers to look up, limited if any resource management beyond tracking h.p., just play your personality and ignore the mechanics - and that's what Fighters as a class (or a subclass) are best suited for. This class is there to be played by new players, or by those who aren't interested in mechanics, or by those whose favoured solution to problems in the fiction is just to hit them with a hammer until they go away...and like it or not, those groups represent a huge number of players!
Trying to shoehorn lots of powers or feats or abilities on to Fighters defeats this feature; and all of 3e (feats)-4e (AEDU)-5e (feats again*) have made this same mistake.
* - feats are in theory optional in 5e, but let's face it - in practice they're not.
So how to make these simple Fighters as powerful/useful at mid-to-high levels as everyone else? The game as designed wants to boost them to match the rest. I say the answer is the reverse: rein in everyone else until they (more or less) match the simple Fighter. Flatten the power grade.
Lan-"enough rambling for now"-efan
