Paladin is a terribly designed class though. It's supposed to represent the champion of a deity, but what do you do when the deity isn't good? And why should every good dieites champions look basically the same? Sure, healing and smiting is righteous and all, but why should the god whose job it is to ferry souls to the afterlife have champions with the same abilities as the goddess of beauty and the arts?
3.5 tends to try to solve this, to the extent that it tries to solve this, by having a separate class for each alignment. Green Ronin's 'The Book of the Righteous' tried a more serious stab at the problem with the 'Holy Warrior' class, but it still couldn't deal with evil 'paladins' (which needed a separate 'Unholy Warrior' class) and still required the DM to create custom feature lists for each deity that needed a 'paladin'.
With a 3.5 style Paladin, you don't have a lot of freedom as a player to customize and design the class to suit the flavor you wants. It's a great class if you want to play a retro 1e style D&D paladin, but its not god for much anything else.
What's needed is more flexibility to choose your abilities.... like the Cleric has with domains or the Fighter has with feats.
The fact that the Paladin has a bunch of hard coded class abilities is a design bug we need to remove from the Paladin - not a feature we want to emmulate in other classes least of all one that is as elegant in its design as the Fighter. The only reason for a class ability is to silo something away as iconic to the class and shared by nothing else. If it can be a feat or a spell, it probably should be a feat or a spell.
My fighter ultimately has only 3 class abilities. Fighters gain a bonus on horror checks resulting to exposure from violence. Fighters gain a bonus on Leadership checks with respect to other fighters. And Fighters gain Mettle - allowing them to ignore the 'partial' or 'half' effect of a Fortitude Partial or Will Partial when they successfully save against the effect. The rest is just lots and lots of bonus feats.
My paladins, that is to say champions, have zero fixed class abilties as such except things like the ability to wear heavy armor, use martial weapons, etc. (though there is no gaurantee they'd in fact do so, and depending on the build it might not make sense to do so). They have a schedule of abilities they gain based on the selection of portfolio that they make when first obtaining the class. So one 'paladin' might have the ability to smite and lay on hands, while another 'paladin' might have the ability to teleport and use psychic blasts, another can summon shadows and provoke extreme thirst, and another can pick pockets and make sneak attacks. Each would have completely different spell lists and powers. Effectively the one class can form something like 500 different classes using about 15 pages of rules text. A portfolio write up is typically shorter than this post if I want to extend the class.
