Wat.
That’s not what Ultima Online did at all.
You remained a peon, you just slaughtered other peons.
Naw. You could become Peon King, or if factions were your thing you could become the Leader of the Council of Mages, Shadowlords, Minnax, or True Brittanians. Real estate allowed players to become Donald Trump level moguls with people like the now famous streamer/YouTuber MarkeeDragon making thousands on player houses on eBay back in the 1990s.
I spent 5 years on UO in its glory days, that game was the definition of a virtual world sandbox.
Factions were such horse manure, people strictly did them cause of the QOL it gave.
Should learn from that.
Having well balanced classes is not the same as homogenization, especially in an MMO RPG. Where if you can’t perform you don’t get to play with others, this was a big problem in vanilla especially at launch and blizzard tried pretty hard to correct it.
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I understand this very intimately.
core game design issue, not a class issue
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For me it is. If you want classes to be unique they need each of them to be able to have this moment where they shine more. And this is why they can’t be balanced as they should be able to perform differently and shine at different times.
The only way for classes to stay unique and to feel balanced is for encounters to offer each different classes to shine. Which is often a problem with M+ and dungeons design because 90% of their design is doing mass aoe on trash.
you understand it, and it goes deeper than that… This is almost always a symptom of the class mechanics being ignored as a component of dungeon / raid design and a way too overly simplistic focus on Zugzug being the only things that matter
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Classes are better when they take inspiration from DND. Things like needing a rogue to pick locks or a mage for transportation is small stuff, but it’s big to class fantasy especially in vanilla.
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Class design is part of core game design 
Now sure encounter design could be done differently but it wasn’t. And when encounter design is almost entirely based around the holy trinity of tank/heal/dps then classes have to be balanced around that.
Yes but its only a part of it, the other components are just as important and when they fail it makes classes less good or too good.
Essentially when the “Content” is poorly designed the classes no matter how good or bad are made far worse.
And if you’re going for a true RPG where classes NEED to be very very different and have different roles, then its a big fatty fail if you don’t design the content so that different classes do different things that are all VERY important to that content.
But instead of wise PVE design blizzard just focuses on zugzug.
no wonder why blizzard hates communicating with you guys.
it would be literally impossible to have an actual discussion.
Sure but WoW never went that route and as such classes need to be balanced around how they did design content. And within the context of how content was designed class design improved greatly over the course of vanilla and into later expansions.
The error was thinking classes needed more of what the others had and failing to develop better PVE.
Sure but that would have been a much bigger paradigm change than merely balancing classes properly within the original design. And more likely to turn people off who were perfectly happy with that original design.
Actually its a much easier problem to solve. Blizzard’s way of making classes work with a single Zugzug way of thinking involved is way harder, and proven over and over in every expansion that I am 100% correct because blizzard fails to get it right.
Having to come up with dozens of different encounter designs to accommodate all the different specs and classes and give each their time to shine seems a lot harder than just tweaking them to fit within an existing and proven design.
And while they might not get things perfect classes are over all fairly well balanced
Its not as complicated as you think.
Class design is 10X harder
I’m not saying it can’t be done.
The other point was that plenty of people were perfectly fine with the original design. I personally wouldn’t like it if every fight had some gimmick like razuvious.
It doesn’t need to be a gimmick, it can also just be a different dps profile.
Making 2 bosses stand next to each others is way different than 2 bosses that stay split apart. Having waves of adds with a bigger add is way different than just small adds. There’s a lot you can do that can make some classes/spec shine without being a mandatory gimmick. While mandatory gimmicks can be fun time to time, having too many in the same raids can feel bad.
That’s fine but that’s largely always been the case already. Some fights favor AOE some might favor ranged etc…