Here's where my disconnect with you is: why do you think a sword and shield fighter and a greataxe fighter are more different from each other than a ranger who uses a bow and a ranger who fights with two weapons? I mean literally your examples of all those 'different' fighters are just weapon choice, which is exactly what you use to indicate that rangers aren't different enough from each other!
Because a sword and shield fighter is the guy who may not dish out the most damage but can take a hit and keep going, staying on his feet and protecting his allies. The greataxe fighter is the guy who steps up and beats the crap out of everything without regard for himself. The duelist fighter is pretty much a completely martially-focused rogue, dancing around the fight to find the enemies weaknesses and stepping in to exploit them. Each one plays differently. Also I listed something like five or six different variations of fighter.
Ranger has "guy in the woods who tracks stuff, hates goblins, and has a pet." The only difference is if he's the guy standing in the back playing Legolas or if he's the human ginsu up front with two blades.
The fighter class at its core is "I take this sharp object and use it to poke holes in bad guys." The variations in the class come from exactly how the fighter does that. It's more than just roleplay choice or picking a weapon, it's a fighting style. A samurai, a Spartan soldier, a English archer on the fields of the Battle of Hastings, a Renaissance duelist...these are all fighters. They all have different ways of approaching combat and completely different styles, but they all use martial abilities to stab/slice/bludgeon opponents. Same class, different themes.
What I want to know from the people who are supporting the ranger as a class is how that class can have its definition stretched enough to support that many archetypes - that many character builds - without losing at its core what it is to be a ranger. If being a ranger is only what I said above, you can't stretch that definition except to include two archetypes - archer ranger and two-weapon ranger.
If you think there's more to being a ranger than just that, show me. Show me different variations on the ranger that feel thematically different from one another, but at the same time are still rangers. Tell me exactly what it is to be a ranger in the most basic, simple terms. That's what I want to know, and that's what we should be talking about.