Well, there's "love to hate," sure.
Heck, look at how much money
Aquaman made. Oh, wait, they replaced the mocked character with Aquamoa and then it made a lot of money.
I doubt inclusion ever came down to straight-up popularity. What was ultimately excluded from the PH that was actually on the table? Psionics & the Warlord. Not things that only a relative few liked (like the Druid, Bard, &c), but things that a relative few
hated - in the refuse to tolerate sense, not the love to hate sense.
Without the data to back that up it's just conjecture.
This is a reddit survey result for 5e from 2 years ago with over 8000 responses. 8000 is a decent sample size. It also included UA versions of the artificer and mystic from the time. Here is the ranking of official classes from that poll. Then.
| Rank | Class(%) |
|---|
| #1 | Bard (12.25)% |
| #2 | Warlock (12.12%) |
| #3 | Wizard (11.95%) |
| #4 | Rogue (9.11%) |
| #5 | Paladin (8.8%) |
| #6 | Monk (7.84%) |
| #7 | Fighter (7.36%) |
| #8 | Cleric (7.14%) |
| #9 | Sorcerer (6.13%) |
| #10 | Druid (5.23%) |
| #11 | Barbarian (4.14%) |
| #12 | Ranger (4.09%) |
Now (I just went back to the original poll results to see where it ended).
That is strictly a popularity vote. Bards are popular. That's still largely forum users, however. In 2016, Mearls gave
this information. It stated that the traditional classes were largely the most used, with paladins and warlocks trailing in 5th and 6th place while druids were in last. Last place was still close to the 5th most popular race. What we don't know is the number of surveys back.
The WotC survey also indicated that the mystic class was hitting satisfaction but needed some mechanical work.
Here is another poll with a few thousand votes to sample. It's "what is your main character?"
Here is another poll. This one is also from a couple years ago and includes artificer. Nearly 10,000 votes.
People have been making polls for some time. Bards don't struggle on them. What I struggle with is finding a good poll to demonstrate the popularity of psionicists or warlords. I see people claim they are popular but looking
@Sacrosanct's poll
here they don't look like they would make the cut as a core class according to Enworld.
That poll restricts to 6 classes for a core game so would not necessarily be strictly popularity. Here is the poll from the
7 classes to keep thread.
Warlords, psionicists/mystics, and artificers look like they wouldn't make the cut. They would fall under "other" as write-ins. This next poll is "
the best class" poll. It doesn't have a lot of votes but there is some consistency with the bigger polls made earlier.
Write-in's didn't make it far there either, but the point is bards are consistently rated well based on popularity. Druids aren't the bottom either.
Before you mention "neo-Vancian casting" and "tiers" to explain those results I'm going to mention
this detailed survey. The author of the survey also seemed to be following the presumptions of tiers, but some of the polled criteria included subject impressions about level of enjoyment playing. It turned out that the 3 most fun options were battle master fighter, totem barbarian, and lore bard as subjectively responded. College of Lore bards also came in second place on this
survey where hex blades, lore bards, and battle masters topped the list.
5e polls are easy to find and they support these classes. I'm struggling to find support for lack of popularity for bards and druids. They seemed middle to lower in the main pack to me. The same with support for warlords and psionicists. I've seen claims of popularity but I cannot seem to find evidence to support it.
Psionics are sometimes, like Wild Talent represents a bit, un-controlled. They go off when the psionic is stressed or frightened or whatever, or even just randomly and may manifest differently. Carrie was always a Teke, for instance, but when and how it manifested wasn't anything she consciously controlled. Alan Dean Foster's 'Flinx' had minor telepathic powers that were iffy, and other powers that manifested inconsistently.
It's not too odd for supernatural powers to change in genre. It's odd for them to change systematically at the whim of the character wielding them, as spells have always done in D&D.
*Nods. "My psychic powers change by reading a book" is very odd.
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