Gripes about Pathfinder

[Psyren]

This is perhaps one of the biggest sources of the caster/mundane imbalance in 3.P. I can almost guarantee that without the Fighter, mundane feats would have been better. But they "balanced" around the number of feats Fighters get, instead of the number of feats Barbarians/Rogues/etc. get. Thus, the feats are weaker, so non-Fighters get a bunch of weak feats for no good reason, and Fighters get just enough to keep up (in their theory). Personally, I think that a 20th level Core-only Fighter ought to be a master of all combat styles. He should be good at THF, TWF, S&B, Archery, Thrown weapons, Unarmed, even Singleton. Other classes ought to be more forced to choose, because their class features can augment their chosen style.

I can definitely agree with this line of reasoning.

Well, the Guy at the Gym thing is a source of it.
But I think that it's because, back in the days of yore, Gygax decided that wizards should be better. However, they'd need to suffer through low-level nigh-uselessness to get there, and had a bad XP curve. As time went on, designers realized that being a punching bag for half your career wasn't fun, so wizards got less useless at low levels (and people started campaigns already at high levels). What they failed to do was get the ingrained "wizards are better" mentality out of their heads. After all, it has a storied history in fantasy. The difference is that fantasy tended to attach major drawbacks to magic, which aren't always so fun to play with.

But presumably these folks who are again making this stuff for a living are using things like playtesters, focus groups, polls etc. And presumably, if "Guy at the Gym" was the huge problem it's often portrayed as, they'd have done everything they could to get away from it. The one time they did seriously try to change it was 4e, and it looks like they are heading right back towards it with 5e.

I wouldn't be surprised. First because the majority of their target audience doesn't frequent D&D forum, and second because people on forums tend to contradict each other a lot. I mean, just look at how often we have lengthy debates here on whether class X is better than class Y; it is pretty obvious that if there are ten people that think that X is clearly superior, there will be ten others who are convinced that Y is obviously the better choice.

...that doesn't mean that WOTC and Paizo have clear design goals that they adhere to, but for a game designer I don't really see how listening to message boards would help much.

This is true, but there are some things that I think are more or less universal. Druid power staying consistently high from 1-20 is something few will argue with for instance. Rogues being weak from 1-20 is another (and, I'm willing to bet, led directly to the subsequent creation of the Ninja in PF.)