How could it be "drastically" more popular than it is though?
I said in a previous post. If they were as well-designed as they could be, they'd probably be the most popular class. I'm pretty sure that counts as drastic when coming from "the middle of the pack". Fighters and Rogues do so well not because the classes are particularly well-designed (I don't think Rogue is at the top of anyone's "awesome design" list, much as I love 5E's Soulknife and Swashbuckler), but because the archetypes are popular and accessible. Druid isn't half as popular as Fighter because it's half as good, is it? Druid is probably a roundly stronger class than Fighter, especially at higher levels. But the concept is a lot less accessible.
So who's showing bad faith now?
You are.
Read the actual words. They don't mean what you're claiming. There's literally nothing there saying you are "dumb" for liking them. That's something you've injected so you can complain (hence bad faith). I'm saying that with
all classes, across
all games (not just D&D, not just Monks, not just tabletop RPGs), classes which don't necessarily perform well are often perfectly popular, especially with players who aren't playing at the "elite" end of the spectrum (which almost no-one is in D&D). I think that's a fact that's not even open to dispute. A hard fact. It's very easy to demonstrate with player numbers from MMOs stacked next to the numbers showing the top performers, and classes used by the top 1% of players in those MMOs.
I'm a "casual" player in most videogames (and indeed probably D&D, as I tend to prefer jack of all trades or support classes). I'm who I'm talking about - I often play suboptimal classes in videogames (sheesh, usually maybe). So what, you think
I'm insulting
me? This is just seeking insult on your part, frankly. It's fair to say I could have been more clear but come on.
Re: D&D, because all the classes perform fairly close to each other, this is even more the case. Monks are not a particularly well-designed class, and have amount of needless Shaolin baggage (likely as a result of hurried "Apology Edition" design) which makes them less popular than a differently-named class without that baggage but otherwise similar performance would be. But still enough people want the basic "martial artist" archetype that they're in the middle of the pack, and Monks have reasonable performance, like all 5E classes. I remember someone did a detailed but crude analysis of the performance of all 5E classes/subclasses, and found that, like, if the top performers were 10/10, the worst performers were like 6.8-7/10, and I'd certainly subscribe to that (just as a general approach at least).
That's similar to games like WoW. If you look at the DPS or healing charts, you see that the worst performers are usually about 70% of the very best. And as a person who has played tanks for years in that, I'd say it was similar there (though it is harder to analyze) - usually, at the very highest end, only 1-2 tanks will be considered "viable", but realistically, until you're at that level, it's hard to tell. Player skill and so on tends to dominate. That doesn't mean that badly-designed tanks aren't badly-designed, doesn't mean that, just because they're popular, we should ignore the mechanical shortcomings. Like, if play Druid tank in a lot of expansions, I'm working twice as hard to get up to that similar level of performance and it's a lot less fun - but there are still absolutely bunches of Druid tanks until you get to the very high end (disclaimer I stopped following WoW after the Great Revealing of Horror, so I dunno which tank is top these days - I play a slightly second-rate tank class in FFXIV instead - FFXIV does balancing better than anyone simply by removing all choices/specs, I note, but that's a whole other discussion!).
