There’s generally this theme I hear whenever I talk to other DMs online or in person, and I get frustrated with my fellow DMs for not understanding this: the kinds of games DMs love are not the same players love. Not every DM, but some forever DMs are all about super minimal games and they really love constraining the players and taking options away from them. My players love crunch and options. Classes to pick from and build out and test. I hate that and prefer way more open-ended and creative games like Fate or OSR where there’s only a few options that you can flavor as you wish. I love the blank canvas, they want the menu of options. DMs love minimal games because there’s less rules for them to have to remember and fiddle with and adjudicate and they can just concentrate on the prep. But there are many things that bring a player to the table. For some the game system in and of itself is the appeal. Getting to pick some actual abilities with actual crunch and tangible in-game effects is like Christmas for them.
A mindset I don’t have to share in order to understand and try to provide for. My own brain was messed up by the chasm width problem early on so I could never really care about these player abilities knowing that the DMs were likely holding the finger on the scale the entire time. (As in, what good is a +2 to picking locks when the DM could just make all locks be two harder.) But then the blorb principles solved the chasm width problem so now all of this crunch is actually real and there’s something pretty nifty about that.