Why 3.5?

[Darg]

There are a couple misconceptions floating around here. Evil spells turn you evil. A neutral cleric will not make use of animate dead on any regular basis to keep undead minions as then they would be evil. At best they'll rebuke or command them if they have the ability. Not everyone plays evil and not everyone plays plays where neutral characters are immune to the corruption of evil just because they play with orphans in a church. Assumptions of class superiority based on optional character choices are not very convincing. At best one can argue that an evil cleric is more powerful than a good one, then again we also know that isn't necessarily the case.

Another misconception is crafting your own items allowing you to double WBL. If you did that, by level 20 you cost yourself ~30,400 xp and 1-5 feats for just one person. Do that for 4 people and it's 121,600 xp. Now add in all the wishes, xp cost spells, time spent making items, etc. and it simply falls apart. Yes, crafting is a valuable tool, but it still has a large cost in resources and opportunity that seems to be ignored in these discussions out of convenience. While this over simplifies the negatives of crafting so does glossing over them.