I guarantee more people would play a more strigent 5e mode than play dragonborn, halflings, gnomes, and half orcs combined. Or will play warlocks, sorcerors, druids, rangers, or monks combined. Ordinance the bottom half least popular romance options. Core rules, by definition, are part of the core game. Without them there'd be nothing to play. Lol
Adding the option for star/hp rolls for example would effect ZERO people who don't choose. Changing racial stat points affects EVERYONE.
Why are people defending the lack of options when larian brags about giving options and originally bragged about "95% compliance".
A lot of people won't choose easy or 'tactitian' mode. Guess they should bother. Might as well get rid of all races but humans. All classes but fighter,mage rogue, and clear. Only give access to swords. Etc. Etc.
I can probably agree about the races you mentioned except dragonborns. Sure they're bad now but I don't think Larian are finished balancing the game for release. The classes that have terrible bonuses will most likely get some boosts, and especially dragonborns, I think Larian will be keen to motivate people to play that race so I wouldn't be surprised if at release or after one of the early patches dragonborns become one of the most desirable races. But I definitely can't agree with you on the classes. Warlocks and sorcerers especially are key cornerstones of most parties in my experience because they can not only serve as the party's spellcaster but also as the party's negotiator...someone who is extremely good at speech solves A LOT of problems in D&D. And for BG3 that can only be the player character as party members can't take the lead role in a lot of conversations, only in very scripted scenarios like Lae'zel talking to the Githyankis. And especially in a game like this with so many speech options charisma based characters and skill monkeys will probably be the most popular. And I definitely don't think bards will be more popular. For the dark urge origin though I think rogue is by far the best class to go with since dark urge is clearly related in some way to Bhaal and all the boons of Bhaal will most likely be made for rogues(especially the cape that was shown by Fextralife as only obtainable by the dark urge...that is 1,000,000% a boon of Bhaal who himself in life was a shapeshifting rogue assassin.
As for rolling for stats or HP, I don't know...years ago Larian said they were planning to do it but no word recently so it's unclear if maybe they're still working on it or if that has been scrapped and will never be put in the game.
As for the difficulties and difficulties I think you grossly underestimate the popularity of both easy and hard modes. A LOT of players gravitate either towards always playing on the hardest possible settings or the easiest. In the balance of things I would not be surprised if fewer play on normal than Exploration and Tactician combined even if Normal has the highest count of any individual difficulty players.
