My understanding of D&D spellcasting (which is IMO only loosely Vancian) is that when you prepared a spell you were doing more than just memorizing it, you were actually performing the first part of the ritual of casting it. The final part, when you cast the spell in play, is only the last few seconds necessary to target and trigger the spell you earlier that morning spent minutes preparing.
The anology with chocolate chip cookies is that you look up the recipe, make the batter, grease the pans, spoon out the balls of dough, put them in the oven, bake them, and leave them in a warming oven and then when its time to eat them you take the still warm cookies out of the oven and present them. Then someone who isn't a baker goes, "That's magic. Do it again!", and you go, "What do you mean do it again? I can't just make cookies appear out of thin air.", and the critic goes, "Yes, you did, I just saw you make cookies. It took you like 3 seconds. Why can't you just look at the recipe again and pull some more out of the oven?"
*grumble grumble ungrateful little ignorant brat grumble if he knows so much about baking cookies he can just do it himself next time grumble*
It's the same thing with spellcasting. You've done all that work getting ready, and you are just making it look easy.
I'm rather happy with the 3.5 cleric. The only thing I've felt the need to change is that clerics don't automatically know all cleric spells, making their domain spell lists far more important. I wouldn't necessarily mind making the domains more important, but balance would be a very difficult question.
Other classes keep taking the fighters stuff. Basically, you just kill every martial PrC or variant base class and give it all back to the fighter, since it should have been his stuff in the first place.