The Rogue and the Fighter do have the highest power budget assigned to their Subclasses of the core 12, as opposed to the more core feature oriented Bard for example.
Okay, so the thing you hate is subclasses.
I agree with much of this. I think the problem is there isn't an "Expert" class and unfortunately the Rogue and Bard, due to expertise, are forced to serve that role.
It's a feature to not create new classes and because WOTC was afraid of the fanbbase to stamp down on core flavor or mechanics.
Mechanics aren't flavor and do not have flavor in themselves, they serve flavor within a design framework. Elegance is one of the best indicators of good design.
That's my point.
Overlap doesn't matter. If for some reason you or your players care about overlap, just choose classes that don't. So if player A picks the slightly more fighty cleric, nobody else picks a cleric. That way your players don't overlap and those of us who don't care about overlap and want more classes all have what they want.
That's because the flavor resides in the Subclass.
I mean, I'd say the reasonabl3 compromise Ground is what we have now already with 13 Classes in 5E, instead of 4 with robust Subclasses as D&D Next started with.
