Maybe it's my background having started playing with AD&D 2e, but D&D used to explicitly model itself on historic and folklore characters and openly encourage, or outright expect, characters and campaigns built around historic characters and events. It has been explicitly historical in the past.
The 2e AD&D PHB specifically Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart as examples of the Fighter class, it used Homer and Will Scarlet as examples of Bards, it used Reynard the Fox and Ali Baba as examples of the Thief class, it used Robin Hood and Orion as an example of the Ranger class, it lists Roland, the Peers of Charlemagne and Sir Galahad as examples of Paladins. It explicitly said that the Druid class was based on the Germanic tribes of Western Europe during the era of the Roman Empire, it gave Archbishop Turpin from The Song of Roland as the example of an iconic Cleric, it notes that while the Wizard has no direct historic counterpart that examples from folklore would be Merlin or Circe.
First, on the subject of the Noble, you'll note that Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart are fighters. This is an absolutely sensible choice - but e.g. Elanor of Aquitaine was definitely not a fighter.
Second one of the things 3.0 noticed was that D&D 2e (well, any edition) was awful at actually modelling history or even fantasy fiction. There's the notorious early Dragon letter pointing out that Gandalf was fifth level.
D&D sourcebooks used to often assume that a D&D game was set in a world that was essentially the same culture, technology, and mindset as Medieval Europe, with magic and monsters being real instead of folklore and superstition, that demihumans would exist only on the fringes of society with humans presumed to being predominant, that magic was rare, and that to a typical peasant the only real difference between D&D and history would be that instead of a monotheistic religion, they had a polytheistic one.
And this quite frequently made them absolutely hilarious. You can not add magic being handed out without doing things to the social order. And D&D's grasp of what Medieval Europe actually was was ... interesting to say the least. Even the armour types are incredibly odd. D&D's grasp of history would make the average SCAdian consider their own court to be realistic by contrast.
The idea that D&D is meant to model pre-modern society as well as purely fantasy worlds is hardly an alien one, and until not too long ago was even an outright official presumption in the core books and officially published settings.
It was hardly an alien one - it was just a failed one and one people were laughing at at the time.
I didn't.
I asked about classes from 3.5, and which ones should have been incorporated into the core rules.
You asked about the core rules
in later editions. It's right there in the thread title. It's right there in the tags. If you meant which classes should have been core in a hypothetical 3.5 greatest hits edition (or Pathfinder) then say that. Because as you phrased it you are asking about what would have been good to take going forward rather than which classes were good for 3.5 because they did something to fix the straightjacketed nature of that game.
I play 3.5 and ignore later editions. I feel that the list of core classes is restricted and awkward, missing key niches like the nobleman, the sage, or the priest that's neither a nature priest (Druid) nor a warpriest (Cleric). . .and that adding the Warlock class in later editions as the ONLY class out of dozens to add to the core seemed nonsensical.
And most of them were there because 3.X locked down so much.
Hence this was me wanting to talk about what should have been added to the core rules other than Warlock, not me wanting to talk about 5e. Where did I give any impression I cared one bit about 5th edition?
When you talked about later editions. Later editions where the magic system wasn't as straightjacketed as it had been in 3.5 and therefore classes that existed as escape attempts to hard Vancian casting (notably the sorcerer, favoured soul, and mystic) didn't have half the interest.
I explicitly even said that my attempts to play it ended in dismal failure as I tried to explain my character concept to the DM in 3 separate games, only to be told that (5e) D&D doesn't do that, so stick to the classes and races in the PHB, which resulted in me not bothering to play because I didn't want to be straightjacketed to the cookie-cutter stereotypes of the core classes.
And I explicitly talked about that and pointed out that your "character concept" was hard-coded into the mechanics of D&D 3.5. Unless you have something to say why your "character concept" was not something tightly tied to the 3.5 rules and what doesn't fit the core class with 5e spellcasting I can't see a single reason what you wanted wasn't what the 5e cleric actually did. It wasn't a character concept you wanted. It was, so far as I can tell, a specific 3.5 mechanical patch - a patch that is not present because there is no leak for it to cover.
Since we can't use a time machine to go back to 2000 and insert a 12th character class in the 3e PHB, they'd have to be added later. Talking about adding classes to the core would have to mention that they'd have to be added to later editions.
But to talk about that you need to talk about the actual later editions and to understand how the magic system works in them. Because it isn't the same way as it works in 3.5. You have continued to ignore this point and continually failed to say what other than a more improvised form of casting you wanted out of them.
On the other hand you could talk about what you would have wanted extra in 3.5 and which the best base classes were.
Now I don't care about 3.5. I do care about classes and about character concepts which is why the thread drew me in. I strongly disagree with the idea of a noble as a class because of this but found the idea that there must be at least some gold in that plethora of character classes to be interesting and was really hoping for someone to come out and sell me on why e.g. the Dread Necromancer was an awesome class because that would give me something to loot and homebrew. So far I've been disappointed but entirely unsurprised.
