Quote Originally Posted by kyoryu View Post
So, look at 3.x. Sure you can make a completely non-combat character by searching through 20 splats and adding stuff together.

Or I can do the same thing in Fate or GURPS with a lot less effort.

Some people like showing the mastery that they can do that in 3.x They like mastering the complex system and showing what they can do. It's a thing in tabletop games, in video games, all over the place. Like a lot of systems offer "you can do anything" but, really, boil down to a half dozen builds. People like the complexity of figuring these builds out, rather than just being handed that half dozen choices, even though in terms of real depth it's basically the same.
I think that is more how granular 3.x could get, you could make just about any character concept and represent it mechanically. I don't know about Fate or Gurps but at least in 5e I have gotten frustrated trying to make some fairly basic concepts with what is given. But that might be more limitations of the class system, 3.x had enough classes to get the options but there were so many that it was difficult to navigate, where 5e has so few and the use of sub classes can make for grab bags of abilities that don't make much sense for the character or things that simply don't exist.
My example was trying to make a Frost priest, homebrewing a domain because the existing ones don't really fit, and my conclusion was you would still end up with a lot of healing, light, and radiant damage without overhauling the cleric.