Sick of the ranger

[Saeviomagy]

If you want to play a melee ranger without a beast companion, you now have a feature which provides no benefit to you in your preferred combat arena. You CAN pick up feats which allow it to help you, but now you are one feat down on the other rangers.

The question is... why do you want to play this type of ranger? And why does the character have to be a ranger? We really need to take this into account before we look at "what we can do to make two-weapon melee rangers more interesting".