"Optimized" characters or parties?

[Ulzgoroth]

Nonsense. It's no more unfair than getting a free choice in your eye color, because it doesn't affect anything mechanical. It's purely a matter of flavor.

Er, no. Because, you see, making pastry impacts on the simulated world, and is non-random. None of the character features that you can select freely are like that, even if they ought to be (height and weight, say, are mechanically both largely irrelevant and random despite what reality might suggest).

Two things. First, keep in mind, you're talking about an economic system where the daily wage for an unskilled laborer is only half as much as a single poor quality meal costs. I understand what you're saying, but the problem isn't this instance of flavor, it's the fact that D&D's system as a whole is an abominably poor economic model. As long as the problem is the mechanic itself, why restrict a player from having a charming bit of fluff? By definition, as pure flavor, it's not exploitable.

Second, I have very, VERY little experience with baking, but I don't see anything inherently unreasonable about an amateur baker not being able to make more money with it than they would hauling crates. There's a combination of factors at work: they're probably good at baking only a limited range of things, they're not going to be as quick or efficient as someone trained in making a profession out of it, and they're paying for the ingredients themselves rather than selling their skill to a bakery. Even if that doesn't satisfy you, I'm not the one who matters; ask the player who wants to bake for flavor reasons to justify it. Maybe they'll come up with something interesting (perhaps what they make looks like a sloppy hideous mess, even though it tastes great).

To the first, you've got your facts wrong...one silver buys a day's worth of poor meals, by PHB. And of course, the wiser laborers, and especially the ones with families, will probably be shopping at the market that gets you a pound of flour or a whole chicken for 2 coppers. If they can afford it, maybe whole half-pound loves of bread for the same price. Buying prepared meals is an extravagance for the likes of them.

For the second, maybe they can cripple their special talent badly enough so as not to absolutely force a non-zero profession(cook/baker) rank. Even so they're trying to extract a mechanical ability for their character at no cost whatsoever. Is it intended for 'crunchy' applications? Probably not. To me, there's no such thing as a truly non-crunchy application. At least one skill rank and a decent modifier, that's all I ask.

As a sidenote, if you're worried about logical consistency in general, I think there are much bigger fish to fry with D&D.

Noted, but I'm optimistic enough to think they can all be fried. At least, well enough to not disturb me too much.

It's no more logical that someone without ranks in profession(cook) can make a tasty pastry, than it is to say that someone with ranks in Profession(Cook), can cook anything equally well. So you either have to go down the road of sub-specialization (e.g., Profession(French Pastry Chef)), which quickly gets ridiculous, or admit it's an abstraction of the ability to cook professionally.

And a fighter, of course, can use absolutely any weapon not deemed 'exotic', whether or not it even resembles anything they've ever seen before in their lives. And for that matter, climbing rock walls, ropes, and trees require the exact same skillset.

To deal with this without inventing a hundred sub-specialties, the default is to say that any proficient cook has general skills and knowledge necessary to work through just about anything at their skill level. This denies them the ability to do anything exceptionally well, unless they do it by a voluntary penalty on everything else. If DMing, in that particular field, I'd probably be convinced that +2 on pastrymaking-related checks and a -1 on all other cooking checks was a fair character trait.

For a real-world example, I present my wife. She bakes wonderful pies. I mean really, good, easily the equal of what you get in a bakery, and so on.

However, I wouldn't expect her to be able to quit her day job and take up pie-making to earn her living. It's a different skill. So, even without 'ranks' in profession(Bake Yummy Pies), (i.e. she can't earn a living doing it) she can still render a delectable treat when inspired to do so.

Are you sure she couldn't? Probably, without knowing the pies in question, not at an actual bakery or restaurant. I doubt they're in the market for people who only make pie and don't have fancy certificates or widespread fame. But maybe at a truck stop (If any of them don't use frozen pies...). And very probably, in a D&D setting. Any prosperous inn would be seriously tempted by a decent pie-maker, at least if she could make passable stew or bread at the same time.

I'd require a trained check and a decent modifier to reliably make a really good pie. If a player wants to restrict their ability by assigning their character total non-proficiency in the non-pie culinary arts, that would be an interesting and flavorful decision.