Super easy: start at level 3-5. Seriously.
I didn't like how in 4e it was literally impossible have that classic D&D low level experience as even the first level characters felt heroic an powerful. A lot of people actually like the starting characters being simple and weak and then growing to become more complex and powerful. And sure, you might not always want that: in 3e we sometimes started at the third level. A game that has relatively weak and simple characters at first allow starting with more powerful and complex characters just by adjusting the starting level, however the inverse is not true.
And for the number of DMs (incredibly enormous, certainly vast majority in my experience) who adamantly refuse to never start characters before first level, ever, no matter how many bad experiences people have had or how sweetly you ask them?
You act as though I as a player have any control over this at all.
And as an aside, there is (and always has been) a way for us to have our cake and eat it too: "zero levels," "novice levels," whatever you want to call them, an OPT-IN zero-to-hero approach so that it isn't forced on every single newbie that comes along, but is fully supported and emphatically not ghettoized or deprecated. Of course, that's another thing that cannot be added to 5e as it is...
My recommendation is that you accept reality; 6th edition is not going to recapitulate 4th edition. Hasbro wants to make money, not satisfy your desires, and they've got the relative sales numbers for 4th and 5th to look at.
I thought 5e was supposed to be the big tent, that everyone could come to and get a pretty good shot at the style of D&D play they like best?
But maybe you're right. You're not the first person to tell me that 5e (in its design and its fanbase) being actively hostile to my preferences is something I should just meekly accept like a good little nerd.
Go look at EzekielRaiden's post again, particularly the lines "not being afraid of losing my character in the early game" and "being able to play at essentially any table (whether it starts at 1st level or 10th or anywhere in-between) without having to be paranoid that I'd lose my character".
Noboody's doing any conflating, EzekielRaiden explicitly said he doesn't want vulnerable characters.
I never
NEVER
claimed to want characters that weren't vulnerable. Being vulnerable DOES NOT mean "one crit could kill my character outright" or "two high ordinary damage rolls will leave my character dying." That you twisted my words into such an obvious strawman is proof enough that you're willing to read whatever malfeasant meaning you can find, no matter how tortured. I won't be discussing it any further, because (as usual) the so-called "big tent" of 5e immediately becomes
ever so small and confining as soon as someone asks for anything even vaguely 4e-like...exactly in contravention of what the original poster I quoted said.
