Hussar
Legend
Seriously, though: 5e does have that pesky 'everyone who ever loved D&D,' so if he loved D&D for letting him play some utterly mundane fighter at some point, 5e should accomodate him, somehow - and it certainly seems to be doing so, or he wouldn't be so flustered at the prospect of someone else getting to play the much less mundane, but still non-magical fighter he loved playing in some other edition...
...FWIW.
For me, the problem is, that baseline makes the fighter rather flat and boring. Sure, as this thread has shown, a fighter can be competitive, and maybe even better than that, at a specific fighting niche, so long as you only play one type of fighter (two weapon wielding pistol crossbows using the reloading cheese errata ). The poor sword and board fighter, probably the most iconic staple of the genre, is so far down the list, that he's not even considered.
The thing is, in, say, 2e, that sword and board fighter was death on toast. He was the only class to get specialization - thus extra attacks far before anyone else. Plus one of the three classes with access to percentile strength. A purely mundane fighter WAS the best at fighting. No one else came even close and you certainly didn't need to futz about eking out every possible bonus he can find just to be able to keep up with the other classes.
Thing is, in 5e, that's not true. Yes, you can build a fighter that's pretty high up on the DPS list. But only if you take some pretty specific builds. Want to use a shield? Oops, now you are lagging behind. So on and so forth.
I thought the point of the fighter giving up pretty much any class based abilities related to social or exploration pillars was to make fighters best at fighting. Not "best at fighting if we cheese weasel every optimization concept we can lay our hands on". Simply best at fighting.
If the fighter isn't best at fighting, out of the gate, then why doesn't the fighter get stuff for the other pillars? There's no reason a fighter couldn't get bonuses to persuasion/intimidation based on his fame. Why not floating skill bonuses (like say a few d4's he can add to skill checks) for exploration stuff?
I guess my point is, what is the point of fighters being pretty good but not best unless you absolutely optimize him at fighting and not getting anything else? EVERY other fighter type class gets ribbons outside of combat. Totem barbarians get a boatload of goodies, paladins and rangers have spells and healing, monks have all sorts of stuff they can use out of combat.
Why is the fighter getting left in the cold. Would it terribly unbalance the fighter to give him a dice pool of skill bonus dice, in a similar vein to the cleric getting Guidance spells?