Combat is a part of it, but it does Rogue better than Rogue in BG3 because you get more skill proficiencies, have additional non-combat solutions through spells like Speak With Animal, can get a huge +10 to stealth with Pass Without Trace for the party and Guidance is so easily available that the Expertise bonus just kinda disappears into the background. Expertise isn't a very strong feature at low level, because it depends on your proficiency bonus and it is only 2 skills.
Okay, with you. Thanks for your patience
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My own take on this, as a non-PnP player not otherwise familiar with 5e, is that yes we can make a sneaky hunter-type ranger who is good enough to open all the locks and disarm traps we come across in EA. To me this feels like a valid ranger archetype, and building in this way means compromising to some degree on the other things a ranger might be, such as a heroic Aragorn-(or Drizzt?)-alike or a nature buff. Particularly as we don’t have multiclassing I think it’s great we can make this kind of ranger. And even if we do get multiclassing, I think I actually prefer focusing on using backgrounds and emphasising areas where classes overlap to give one class the flavour of another over taking levels in another class, especially given we’re not expecting all that many levels even in the full game.
None of which, I realise, gets at what I think is your biggest problem. I do agree that rogues could justifiably be grumpy that the right build of ranger can do everything they can (well enough, if not always quite as well as them), plus other stuff too. For me, though, this is something I’d like to see addressed by balancing tweaks and careful consideration of how rogues vs sneaky rangers progress from level 5 to 11 or whatever it ends up being, rather than by revising the BG3 approach to rangers.
To conclude with a desperate, if possibly doomed, attempt to make all this seem on topic … the main thing I enjoy about the fact that we can pick FE/NE options at character creation is that it, along with the Background, helps me come up with a story for my ranger that brings them to life. The specific benefits of these picks might be tiny in themselves, but I enjoy thinking of ways to build on and take advantage of them to make distinct kinds of ranger, including sneaky trap/lock handling ones!
