I apologize because I feel like I am giving a negative impression that I don't think is justified. I have competing feelings about PF2 on paper, and I think I need to play to see if any of that really matters. I look at form a Designer, a DM, and a player. On paper there a things in all three of those categories that look awesome and some that worry me, But that is true of most games. Personally, I tend to find the system doesn't matter as much as me, and I would think that would be the case for PF2 too.
I think your definition of effective is different than mine (and a lot of other posters in these forums). But it does sound like you have an optimizer's perspective, which neither I nor my group is.
It is not just my 5e game, that includes my 1e and 4e games too. My players and I don't play D&D to optimize. We don't chase the best spell, equipment, feat, sub-class, race, strategy or synergy. We pick a character we want to play and play. It is that simple. If I can do that in PF2e, I', sure I'll be fine. Just don't expect me to contribute much in combat because I am terrible at tactics and synergy!
This what I don't understand. Why would you want a game with choices that so clearly outclass other choices if you don't play that way? Why would you want them to exist?
Let's talk within the context of the game it sounds like you play right now.
Say a guy wants to make a two-weapon wielder in 5E. He makes a regular fighter. Buys the two-weapon feat that let's him at least use two equal sized weapons. He gets to use his bonus action to attack with two-longswords for 1d8+strength each. With
bless he gets the same +1d4 as the rest of the party. He hits twice a round averaging 1d8+4 per attack for 17 points of damage per round.
Here comes Mr. Two-hander paladin with Great Weapon Master. He's using a two-handed sword with bless. This reduces his negative attack roll by an average of 2. So when he uses GWM, he is -5/+10 damage. His average hit is 1d12+14. Every time he hits he does 20 points of damage not including smites with a -3 to hit absent advantage.
This means each hit from the GWM is more valuable than two strikes from the two-hander fighter for a slight reduction to hit. This gap just increases if you add in smites and critical hits. So it is better for the party to focus on getting the GWM fighter more hits than the two-weapon fighter in every single situation.
That is optimization. So the player playing a two-weapon fighter is suddenly a chump who made bad choices as a player because they are bad choices to be made. In fact, the only good choice is the GWM two-hander fighter, every other choice is basically a bad choice. To some this is building a great character, but to me it means there are more sub-optimal choices in the game than optimal choices. It's not even about optimal choices for what you want to do like say two-weapon fighting. It's more that there is only one type of fighting that is optimal and if you're not doing it, then you're not competitive. I think that type of game design is poor. I find it limits character variability and punishes players who may want to play a two-weapon fighter because they liked Mad Martigan in Willow or Drizz't Do'urden in The Forgotten Realms or some sword and shield using knight in Arthurian legend. It's basically saying only Conan or some big two-hander guy is truly powerful within the context of the world and everyone else is some chump.
I don't like that type of game design. I much prefer a type of game design where you can pick a fighting style or character type that is a relative power level where you do things differently, but not sub-optimally. If the two-weapon fighter and the two-hander fighter do roughly the same amount of damage with maybe the two-hander guy getting a higher weapon die while two-weapon guy gets an additional attack, then we have much closer balance and less of a feeling of the two-weapon guy being mathematically less valuable than the two-hander guy in nearly every circumstance.
Players aren't dumb. They know when they're numbers are a good deal lower than another player's numbers. It ruins many player's enjoyment of the game and makes them feel like a less valuable contributor to the most important parts of the games: battles against the BBEG. It also decreases character choice by making the same choices optimal over and over again and forcing players to fit character concepts to powerful mechanics rather than the mechanics supporting whatever character concept they want today. I don't get why some want that in the game.
I played with this type of play for all of 3E. I didn't mind it at first because in 2E two-weapon fighters were supreme, so it was a refreshing change to see two-hander fighters being on top. Now I've seen that for ten plus years. Now I'd like see all fighting styles relatively balanced, so people can play what they want and not have to watch someone else double their numbers or more. I'm happy to see the fighting styles much tighter now and less encouraging of optimal playstyles.
