As brokenness in this case is completely subjective, it can't be less broken objectively.
Oh, 5e is certainly less broken than 3.x, in the same sense that a sauna is a better refrigerator than an open-hearth steel mill. And, no, there's nothing subjective about Class Tiers or LFQW - the latter's not only objective, but quantitative.
I mean, you can argue that the class imbalances in both editions are a solid reflection of design intent, rather than accidental, and thus not 'broken' in the sense of a dropped vase being a collection of sharp fragments of glass when it was intended to be a smooth vessel capable of containing a liquid, but, functional in the sense of, well, a collection of sharp pieces of glass designed to be strewn on the floor to inflict injury on anyone walking barefoot over them (in case you ever wanted to smuggle caltrops through a metal detector, for instance).
For something to be objectively broken, it has to be like the broken math in 4e that required the expertise feats to fix.
heh. That sounds like you're saying something that's irreparable can't be counted as broken, but something that has been fixed, can still can be labeled broken. Cute.
CR in 3e was borked to high heaven. It was virtually meaningless. A PC group could defeat a creature 5 or 6 CR above them, then die to one 4 below them.
OK, that might be valid to compare to the level range on the cover of a TSR module, afterall.
I stuck with 3.0e and have never regretted it. After years of playing I'm still finding things that 3.5 changed that just make my jaw drop.
I don't often hear that, but I do kinda agree. 3.5 made a lot of little changes to 3.0, some of which seemed like obvious 'improvements,' others seemed like bad ideas, and still others merely strange. The Skill list made a little more sense, for instance. The addition of casters-stat boosting 2nd level spells and reduction in duration of what had been go-to party buffs, was inexplicable gasoline on the fire. While the whole weapon shrinkage issue seemed like an odd thing to focus on.
Despite superficial similarity, 3.5e was a vastly inferior game to 3.0e, that was clearly changed without a lot of playtesting based solely on theory and whim and a misguided notion of "elegance" that removed so many balancing elements from 3.0e, especially in terms of the spells. 3.5e famously fixed Haste and Harm, which was probably needed, but then it broke dozens of other key spells in ways that were not only terrible for balance, but terrible for gameplay. In particular, 3.5e broke wide open shape changing spells of all levels from Alter Self to Polymorph and it broke wide open summoning spells. Both not only killed balance, but they set up a situation where the most optimized play of the game centered around the games most complex and difficult to resolve elements. And it didn't help that in the process of breaking these spells, they'd also made the process of resolving them at the table more time consuming.
Polymorph had seemed pretty broken in 3.0, and late 3.5 saw an errata to it of some sort, IIRC? Also Hold Person got the save-per-round thing if not at 3.5 release, then later?
….darn, my memory's gotten even fuzzier than I'd realized.