That doesn't make sense to me. In a class based game you should just play a caster class or at least multiclass into one if you want that amount of spellcasting. Parcelling class features into feats and allowing stacking them would make me question why we even have classes, as they could all just be broken down into feat chains and people could build characters by combining them.
In a game where the basic challenges are well below the average PC starting point, what does suboptimal matter? If you're an optimizer, you already have a list of optimal and suboptimal feats, so chains won't really change much other than give you some more fun optimizing time. To everyone else suboptimal is irrelevant, since suboptimal still = good.
Crawford said in the interview(I'm not calling it Sage Advice) that the goal was for feats to be classless class options. Essentially another way to multiclass.
Just to understand:
No - I'm assuming that any feat you get with a background is just as good as any other feat. Otherwise why have it be a feat at all?
Well, what he said was that Feats were already treated as the same thing as Class features by the development team. So, all Classes are already basically point-buy builds of unspoken Feat combos. Which was obvious in 2014 already, but really obvious once you listen to Mike Mearls happy Fun Hour making new Subclass options.
So that it can be picked up later. In this case, so others can have the mechanical effects of being a Knight of Solamnia or be an adept of one of the Towers of High Sorcery even if one didn't pick that as your background.
It's a free feat that gives you extra abilities that other folks don't get. You don't need a feat to belong to an organization so a feat like you're suggesting is not needed.
All characters get the effects of a feature. If that feature is presented directly, or granted as a feat that gives the exact same thing, that is still the same amount.
I never claimed that you need a feat to belong to an organization. I claimed the feat was giving your character the mechanical benefits of belonging to the organization.
Feats are of varying strengths in the book. Actor usually isn't considered as good as Lucky, for instance. If a character wants to pick up the mechanical effects, they can. If they don't want to, they don't have to. As you said, there is no need to take a feat to belong to an organization. So this is basically "if this is what I want out of a feat, I'll take it, if not, I won't". Just like sometimes people will take Actor instead of Lucky or some other more widely considered feat.
I think I cross posted a clarifying edit while you were responding so I'll ask you if you don't mind to go back and read that edit rather than repeat it. I do understand what you're saying but I don't think you understand what I'm saying - the upshot is that a player who chooses to be a Knight at character creation gets an advantage over the player who chooses a Background that doesn't provide a feat. It's especially obvious if one character takes the feat to be a squire later so they can gain those mechanical benefits. Either that feat is as good a choice mechanically as any other feat - in which case the Knight player is getting a free feat or that feat is as you say a "lesser feat" - in which case the Folk Hero player loses a feat just to unlock the Knight of the Rose feat access that he wants. And he does this with no compensation for that loss of a feat choice because he didn't get the free feat. And it isn't like the Knight background is a lesser background in compensation for the feat - it gives all of the benefits of a background and a free feat.
