Heh... well, I suspect it's really about whatever particular bugaboo someone has about what is or isn't a psionic character. For one person like
@Flamestrike, it's having 30 different psychic abilities available that would instill the feeling of having a psion... but then for someone else, all they'd need to see is the phrase "spell components" still connected to them to instantly throw the entire blanking system out. All
that particular player needs is to see "No components" and "can't be dispelled/counterspelled and works in an anti-magic field" and the class could have just like 2 abilities and everything would still be hunky-dory.
People are going to get hung up on whatever they get hung up about. But at the end of the day WotC ain't gonna please everyone with whatever they come up with... so everyone is just fighting tooth and nail for the scraps that are out there so that they are the ones who end up with the closest approximation of what they want once WotC gets through.
I think there are some subsidiary issues here, like:
1) A significant proportion of people want to have input on Psionics, but don't like Psionics, and would rather it just went away or became a subset of Arcane magic. There's no way to tell who this is unless they say it (though sometimes they do!), but it's a big issue, because it leads to a lot of suggestions or even demands from people who actually just want this to be a non-option.
2) The is actually one common theme in what people who like Psionics want from Psionics - an actual Psionic class. That the designers appear to be saying this is "too hard" seems beyond ridiculous. Literally all the reasons they give for the Mystic not being okay are reasons the Artificer shouldn't be in game, and frankly several of the base classes (especially the Bard), should not be in the game.
3) WotC were able to work out that the Psionic Wizard was a terrible idea, but apparently were unable to understand that this was in large part because they
weren't a Psion/Psionicist. This shows that they have some serious problems here, either with internal politics (as I strongly believe - someone high up at WotC really hates Psionics and wants it to not happen), or with
4) Re: you "two skills with no components, can't be counterspelled, and working anti-magic fields", well, the latter aren't a thing anymore, and not having components inherently makes a spell impossible to counterspell, according to Jeremy Crawford, anyway. And yeah I think that's true - people who want Psionics, tend to want Psionics. Not spells. This isn't a hugely complex issue, I'd suggest. People overcomplicate it. Yes less abilities, but ones specific to the class would probably be more pleasing.
5) There's a lot of Athas talk in this UA, and I maintain that doing Athas without Psions/Psionicists is a lot like doing Dragonlance, but not having any dragons in it. Yet it looks awfully like that's precisely what they intend to do.
The subclasses are thus not a disaster, but they're an awful lot like having Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster, but not having Wizard or Sorcerer.
dnd.wizards.com
