In the meantime my PC is not min/maxed to the point I can't contribute out of combat.
Your hyperbole is showing. Since when does "getting a 16 in your main stat" equate to anything even
remotely like "min/maxed to the point [one] can't contribute out of combat"? Particularly when that stat is, typically, Dex or Cha, the two stats
which have the most utility out of combat?
Another benefit of not min-maxing is you tend to not have a dump stat, and while you might not be playing to strengths, in a sense you are avoiding a weakness.
As a general rule, avoiding weaknesses is less effective than capitalizing on strengths. One should, of course, attempt to ameliorate weaknesses where they appear. But doing your best at the things you expect to do frequently, and trying where possible to make any weaknesses you possess be infrequent concerns, is a demonstrably and consistently superior strategy when compared to accepting lower performance on common tasks in order to avoid lower performance on uncommon ones.
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Perhaps a better way to phrase some of my criticisms above: Why get mad about people doing the things the game rewards, and not doing the things the game doesn't reward? Many of the results being lamented in this thread are the direct (and entirely foreseeable) consequence of 5e's design. Making ASIs compete with feats, for example, pushes players toward viewing ASIs (and feats) in terms of getting the best benefit they can. Having stats with wildly divergent benefits (e.g. Intelligence is essentially useless to anyone that isn't a Wizard, Artificer, or Int-based skill-user, Strength is extremely important for Barbarians and mostly irrelevant for Rogues, and Dexterity and Constitution are valuable to essentially all characters) exacerbates this situation. Having significant power--both in terms of current state and in terms of future potential--locked in instantly with character creation pushes people toward preparing for the future long before it occurs, rather than rewarding players who allow their characters to grow organically in response to their journey or as they strive toward their (often-changing) goals.
It seems to me that there is a pattern, here, of people being annoyed, often to a particularly pitched degree, because players are looking at the rules of the game and trying to make smart decisions. It is, as both studies have shown and experience will show, completely pointless to try to oppose this impulse. Human beings will
try to be smart and efficient with their resources when in an environment where they are motivated to succeed, and games are one of the most well-demonstrated examples of such an environment.
Instead of getting mad, or telling people off, or trying to present
not following that natural and rational impulse as something
nobler or
superior or whatever, why not actually reward folks who choose differently? Why not grant benefits for folks who defy expectations? Obviously I'm not going to come up with brilliant flawless examples on the fly here, but why not do something like granting a bonus feat for characters who have no stat higher than 14, or who only put stats higher than 14 into "non-primary" stats (e.g. a Warlock with Strength 16, Cha 14)? Or perhaps giving out one cool magic item for folks who choose to play the "standard/expected" bonuses for a given race, while playing a class normally not associated with them, e.g. a Mountain Dwarf Wizard or a Dragonborn Monk?
I get a pretty strong fire-and-brimstone preaching vibe from all this. Trying to
scare the optimizers straight. That will never work. I can promise you that. But the carrot, rather than the stick, actually has a chance of working.
