Clerics on most games are very boring. On D&D, is one of the few games which they are representatives of a deity on the material plane and hence, has a lot of cool stuff. Sadly the balance cult is making then boring too...
Why does a class need to be overpowered to be interesting? A lack of balance leads to classes being unviable, which is likely to suck for players who do not enjoy the flavor of the OP options.
If Clerics were kinda bad, but Bards (or any other class you're not as interested in) did everything everyone does better, would you still hold to this idea that the balance police are trying to make bards boring by calling for it to be in the same ballpark in terms of usefulness as everything else, within its niche?
Balanced classes (and races etc) is something a lot of people call for because we don't want the game to punish people simply for playing something they want rather than what is optimal. If wanting to make more combinations attractive and viable makes me boring, we're very different.
Not need to be OP but look to D&D 4e, by far the most balanced edition and the cost is that all classes are fighter reskins.
But balance is overrated. On VTMB, Nosferatu is by far the hardest clan to be played, an modern game dev would other removed the clan or made the deformity a less impacting thing which would kill the variety or the point of having the clan in the first place. As for races, some people enjoy doing suboptimal challenge runs. If I wanna make an half orc wizard, it should be my right.
That notion that everything needs to be the same is what is killing RPG's.
Not mentioning, that balance is very subjective, see how many people cry over shotguns on BF1/5, the literally less used type of weapon...
I don't find the idea of "intentionally doing something suboptimal for fun" as a good reason to not balance things. It's not like half-orc wizards are all that bad though, as the difference between +2 and +3 isn't that big at levels 1-3, and it opens for picking a +1 Int feat at level 4. Or bad at all, since they get Intimidation for free, dark vision and the option to stop at 1 hp instead of 0 once per long rest. They are a tad unconventional because people see the +2 to strength and the flavor says they are inclined towards being warriors, but they are perfectly viable as wizards. Which is funny, because now we have a good example of a supposedly suboptimal combo that doesn't only work well, but have a set of unique strengths that helps set them apart.
It's almost like the half-orcs are a reasonably well-designed pick, with some bonuses geared towards specific playstyles and other bonuses that are universally useful.
Balancing things so that every class and race option and combination is viable without there being gamebreakingly powerful options that overshadows everything else sounds pretty good to me. Nothing needs to be exactly the same, but advocating that everyone should be in the ballpark is better than having a few useful options and the rest is just there.
