You have choices in every edition. It’s just how many. I don’t need alot of mechanical choices. I want RP choices. Do I choose to slay the dragon? Do i try to make an ally of a local warlord? Those are the important choices to me. Mechanics can get in the way of that. It can pigeonhole characters.
Role playing is why we play the games, am I right? Why else do we play rpgs...?
Every rpg designed is designed to help facilitate a means of helping us players roleplay as part of a group, to have an experience, and different rpgs do do this in different ways.
The last thing I want to experience when I play these games is feeling like I have no say as to how my character grows. Character growth in rpgs comes from 2 things... Game design system choices and table roleplaying social choices.
The first is purely based on what the system offers as choices. The second is inherently based on what the GM is ultimately willing to allow happen and how flexible the GM is in giving players freedom to act and RP their characters. The more a game is based on the paradigm of "Rulings, not Rules" the more the responsibility falls onto the GM to manage and arbitrate and choose for the players what the players can do. How well is the illusion of player freedom of agency on the Role playing side of things can the GM pull off is the primary task of the GM. The more they give players the freedom, the more the players feel is in their hands. But this is 100% in the hands of the GM to help facilitate.
To me, how this relates to the topic at hand... Who wants to play to higher levels when every person of that class gets the same core choices made for them? Baring the 3 or 4 things you get from your subclass... Every person of every class is identical on a game mechanic level. That's pigenholing players IMO.
Then if we look at all of WotC's adventures, not all of them go to higher levels.
And then there is the thing about making characters. All the good choices of this game come in the first few levels. Making characters in 5e is a lot of fun. The game does a good job presenting a lot of options. It's a joy to flip through these books and see all that you can be.
WotC did a fantastic job with presentation in this edition. I can flip through these books and get super excited about a lot of different kind of characters. This is partly because there are a lot of various options available when making characters.
A lot of choice and freedom is given to us when making characters.
I've probably made over 20 characters for 5e because it's that fun.
I've never played past 5th level because I also realize that every single thing I want to do for my character at that point is up to the GM to allow me to do it or not.
And I guess I've had just enough bad experiences with it with GMs who were a bit too railroady and punished me for wanting to do what I wanted my character to do instead of following their plots.