You have respectable and empathetic aims, I dig that. I don’t mean to be contrarian.
I think balance is a continuous pursuit. I should probably disclose that I enjoy asymmetry and enjoy the peaks and valleys that emerges from these kinds of games. So I submit that my bias is influencing this.
I’d like to make one point, perhaps in a dying effort to promote objective performance benchmarks, by sharing a post I made a year ago. It was specifically to try and explain the required dps and pacing for a dungeon, and I share it to highlight how I think important and helpful it can be to analyze what objectively needs to happen (dps thresholds) in lieu of what the player character balance should look like.
Thank you for the good discussion, too. I appreciate your reasoned responses.