It's worth noting that if players, either individually or collectively, fail to take advantage of facilities of a game system, it is not a weakness in the game system itself. Rather, it a weakness in the players. If all Fighters in your game wield longswords, and have exactly the same feats, that's not because the system enforces cookie-cutter characters, but rather because they have failed to differentiate their characters from the masses.
What would be a flaw in the system, and a fairly massive one, would be if one set of feats and abilities were significantly superior to all others, as with the longsword in 2nd Edition. In such a case, you can still differentiate your character, but it is very costly to do so. However, this is not the case with Fighters in D&D, at least in the current edition.
On the other hand, there is a degree of justification in the argument that all Rangers, Paladins, Barbarians, Monks and Rogues start to look alike...
But even then, it is possible, or even easy, to build several different character types for each, by focussing on different aspects of each class (e.g. the mobile barbarian, the damage-soaking barbarian, and the raging berserker).
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