Iconic in what way? Most of the 'Iconic Ranger' stuff people talk about seem to exist only within DnD itself. The DnD Ranger is practically a tautology.
Iconic to ranger. The default D&D setting is an anomaly in fiction.
Most fantasy settings are either really low magic and low power or really high magic and high power. In low magic settings, the setting's rangers rarely use magic if at all as the challenges are more grounded and can be defended with basic skill and expert weapon play. In high power magic settings,rangers are practically wizards wielding weapons.
The DnD ranger is the iconic ranger for the medium level setting. At low levels, rranger don't really need any magic to hunt, track, sneak, travel,and animal animals. Howevereveryone know
the default assumption for D&D is that after a certain point, magic starts popping up everywhere and you need magic to counter the magic. If you are a caster,you already have magic. If you are primarily a warrior, you get magic weapons or become supernatural (like paladins). But skill users, you need guaranteed magic items, spells of you own, or brokenly high skill mods.
And there's way to include spells without making the character a full on spell caster with slots and stuff. You could give them rituals (and expand rituals), for exemple and certain abilities X amount of time per day that are focused on their subclass specialties. The Beast Master could get Animal Messager, Talking to Animal and Locate Animals, for exemple. And then you have design space for a caster subclass like the Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster.
Hate to break it to you but rituals are still spells.
Making a ranger a ritualist still makes him a spellcaster. It just looks and works different.
And a lotofthat seems like a convolutedway to have a customizable list of spells that follow a resource system but not call it spell casting.
Is Rangers being spellcasters so bad that people what to add 2-5 pages in a book to do the same thing under a new name?
Once skill power was finally dissaciated from classin 5e, people should just play the Fighters with Stealth and Survival they always wanted to instead ofwanting a new book with a new class that is "fighter with stealth and survival."