D&D players I think like balance, just not as the be all and end all of D&D. Most games also don't go to the high levels so uber wizards aren't such a thing most of the time even in editions where they are broken.
I think D&D players like to /complain/ about balance, but really /don't/ like to see balance actually fixed.
Take LFQW. People loved complaining about it, but did 3e or 5e really fix it, or just shift the shells around?
The foundation of the complaint goes back to 1e, when a wizard's spell power increased with level impacting multiple factors.
As you leveled up, you got more spells known (greater versatility), higher-level spells with more profound effects, and most spells got also more powerful as you leveled, but your spells rarely got even a little harder to save against.
In 2e, some spells were capped for damage/level.
In 3e, most spells were also capped, and in a more consistent way, and saves scaled with /spell level/ rather than character level, so, in theory, lower level spells should have dropped off in usefulness, but save DCs so overwhelmed save bonuses that only your lowest level spells on a high-level caster had to worry about saves being made too much - and those could be used for utility.
In 5e, spells scaled in power with spell-slot level instead of character level, which should reduce the relative power of lower-level spells as you go, except that saves scale with level (proficiency). So you still have overall spell power increasing multiple ways as casters level. More spells known (versatility), more slots/day, higher level spells, and scaling save DCs - oh, and cantrips increase damage with level, too.
The LF, side, of course, also stayed the linear part was that, for the most part, a fighter's attacks didn't get better in any particularly level-based way, they just hit more often, due to his faster combat-matrix (THAC0) progression and multiple attacks at higher level. That was, if anything, slightly weakened in 3.x, by iterative rather than multiple attacks, though the superior progression was kept. In 5e, the superior progression is lost, but extra attacks restored.
So LFQW remains in 5e, the formula is re-arranged, the factors different, but level still improves casting in multiple ways that stack up dramatically. For PF2 to do away with it, it'd have to do something radical (but, obviously, NOT like 4e did, because that was unacceptable). Either factor level into the fighter's power more than once - for instance, the way 13A did, by increasing damage dice as well as attack bonus as you level - or by severely curtailing caster progressions (for instance, if casters got the same number of spells/day at all levels, but the spells got more powerful, that'd be 'linear').
But it doesn't seem like there's any real impetus in the fanbase to do away with LFQW, anyway, does it?
Why 4E was brought up is that you are basically saying we need 4E type mechanics in the game without saying you want 4E. Since 4E was the only D&D that had the defender and striker concept and gave the classes mechanics to match that.
And that's an understandable attitude to want to take, because anything from 4e is tainted, presumably, doubly so for PF fans who were repelled from the D&D IP by 4e, and supported by Paizo.
But, the omission just makes the idea 'look guilty,' so we really need to acknowledge when 4e did something, and just make a case for how PF2 could accomplish the same thing, without suffering from the association - something 5e got away with a few times, with the handling of monster stat blocks, and of NPCs using the same style of bloc, for instance.
In this case, the idea of the Rogue as DPS king 'striker' is clearly risking the 'MMO' refrain.
If you kill stuff faster its the best debuff yeah?
That's one school of thought, sure, and it generally works pretty well, except when it occasionally fails catastrophically.
It does follow naturally from the way hps work (no death spiral), and DPR is easy to calculate, so it receives a lot of fan scrutiny.
