eamon
Explorer
Menu-style feats don't work well in practice. In fact, it's exactly those kinds of feats that have brought us to this problematic situation. There isn't an overload of confusing, mostly irrelevant feats useful to all characters; there's an overload of overly specific or even restricted-by-prerequisite feats.
Menu-style anything (including powers) is also a bad idea because it drives a wedge between optimized and unoptimized characters. If you need some prerequisite to get a powerful feat, ability or power, how will you find it if you don't yet qualify for the prerequisites? Menu-style characters reward pre-planned level 1-30 builds, and penalize lazier level-by-level advancement. It's a bad idea that should be avoided whereever possible.
We have a system for silo abilities: class features. Feats and powers should not be silo'd whenever possible. It's also simply more fun if you can recognize what others are doing.
In this matter, it's actually powers that are the more problematic. Everyone's confronted by the chaos of the current feat selection process, so people are aware of the drawbacks. But because the power selection problem is less in-your-face, it's more easily overlooked. Were the 4e character building process to be overhauled (which, to be fair, pretty much implies at least a 4.5e) then class powers and feats should be mostly removed. It's perfectly sufficient to have a shared pool of feats/powers with more distinctive, recognizable and fun feats+powers that can be tweaked per-class via keywords.
To illustrate the problem, the only reason people actually recognize the spell Fireball is because of previous editions! And recognition is key to fun and helps verisimilitude too. Look at the way people enjoy music at a party: occasional novel music is fun, but people tend to really get going with a few recognizable classics because it's not just about the audio, it's also about the whole social context and experience.
It also fits much better into the whole 4e philosophy of tactical team play as system mastery, rather than finding obscure character abilities to twink out. Better to have far fewer powers+feats, and each be distinctive and unique than a menu-style approach in which each new power is new (and necessarily less well elaborated than if there'd be fewer) but simultaneously formulaic by virtue of the obvious parallels to powers' of over classes.
