That's nothing race as class can't fix!
I've gotten much more fond of it these days. The wrong D&D won back in 1E....
Yeah...no.
There is no world where D&D takes off to the degree that it did, where that particular facet remains in effect. "Race as class" is a very,
very disliked concept by most gamers, as we can pretty clearly see in the MMO space. Same issue as gender-locked classes, or only having one playable gender for a given race. Heck, even
faction-locked classes are not entirely well-liked, which is why Blizzard very quickly gave the Horde some Paladins (first Blood Elves, then Tauren later on, and finally much later a variant group of Trolls), same for giving the Alliance Shaman (Draenei, later Dwarves, and later still a regional Human subgroup.)
Race as class forbids you from a huge variety of potential stories. It would go over like a lead balloon today to tell people that their elf clerics and dragonborn bards and gnome paladins are verboten because "elf" is a fighter-wizard mashup, "dragonborn" means being a
magic-eating sorcerer-paladin* exclusively, and "gnome" has to be a kooky, quirky illusionist and could never, ever,
ever serve a deity as a pious warrior.
*Note, as I posted in that thread, I actually find the argas concept
very cool, and it's probably one of the only situations where I
might be willing to accept race-as-class. But that's mostly because it is pretty much perfectly directed at my interests, since I love dragons, sorcery, serving the cause of good, and the generically paladin-like nature of the concept. Yet even with it being almost tailor-made for me, despite it being printed before I was even born, I'm still on the fence because of just how
severely limiting race-as-class is.