I don't want to talk about individual trees. I want to talk about the forest.
Uh, I am talking about the forest, you just don't seem to want to go any deeper than broad-brush generalizations because it doesn't help your argument. If we both are having a discussion about the forest and what kind of forest it is, eventually we are going to have to look at some trees.
I have never seen a game this heavy-footed. In nearly every single case, it chooses the most byzantine and complicated solution imaginable. Solutions that doesn't give better outcomes. They mostly just add a greater load to each player's burden of mental capacity required to play the game.
Uh, weren't you the guy who wanted to have many of the feats become skill checks? Because that's way more byzantine and heavy-footed; not only are you increasing the complexity of the system by giving players access to so much more, but adding in more rolls to it. The current system is fine; the amount of feats is balanced by the fact that you don't have to worry about most of them. You take what you want, and that ends up focusing you on something rather than being able to do everything. If you don't like crunch, I respect that, but it's a style preference rather than a systemic issue.
The game is severely overengineered with millions of fidgy little special rules. So why discuss or defend each one, when the truth is that very little of it is actually needed to achieve the (admirable) aim of balance.
I mean, not all of it is balance. I brought up specific examples that you brought up before because your argument was not one about overengineering, but more an argument against rules in general. I remember when you asked "Why can I only crawl 5 feet?" or "Why do I land prone if I take any damage on a fall?" These aren't in the name of balance, these are effects to give color to different tactics or situations.
The bigger problem with this argument is that the "balance" isn't really in the feats, it's in the overall class design. The structure of the classes are strong enough that the feats won't completely overpower anything, reducing the need for system mastery to create a viable character (or avoid falling into a trap build). The feats act to define how you focus that structure, whether with small differences (most general or ancestry feats) or larger differences (class feats).
It all mostly comes across as a way to fool people into discussing individual trees, and as a misdirection to avoid people realizing they are lost in a forest that didn't need to be there.
At a certain point, if you are going to discuss a topic you need to actually get into
some level of specifics. You can't just vaguely gesture around at things forever; you need to start putting out evidence to support an argument. Again, we've had that discussion before and most of your complaints come off as frivolous, which is why I suspect you don't like getting into specifics.
