The joke's on you: thanks to min-maxing, the fighter can't count in the first place!

Why does this sound so familiar?

Warlock: I promised my soul in exchange for great power.

Rogue: To which great power?

Warlock: All of them. Let them fight over it when I am dead.

It's really something that comes down to personal taste. I've played 5e for 6 years, and I've been playing a GURPS campaign for about 7 months.

It's Apple vs. Android. Some people just want to pick it up and play. Some people need that level of customization or the experience isn't enjoyable.

D&D is much easier to pick up. The book says pick a race (species now I guess), class, and background. It even suggests a background and starting gear. If you want, you can customize these two things as much as you like, and picking variant human means picking up a feat at 1 for further refinement. Plus you likely also have some spells or race/class traits to pick from. That's a fair amount of customization at level 1.

Compared to GURPS, you have an OCEAN of options right off the bat. Even if you only have 40 character points, you could spend them in more ways than is possible to experience in a lifetime. The Basic Set alone is massive, and the system has more supplemental material than even D&D 3.5. You can pick some skills and not realize you're missing very fundamental things like 'will my strong fighter guy fail every jump attempt he tries' or 'can I even use any weapon besides a sword' because I didn't invest in that.

I love both systems, and neither one is perfect. Working around the limitations of 5E is actually a lot of fun, but so is making a mutant extra-dimensional spellsword ogre with color blindness, universal digestion, an honest face, and coitophobia.

I have a hard enough time finding people and a schedule for mainstream games. Where the hell am I going to find people who want to GURP with me?

"That's great news! That means all your actions and damage don't count!" - The DM

Pathfinder 2.0 sidestepped this issue by having class-specific feats instead of subclasses. Just pick which features you want dude, no need to be silly about it. And you get a new choice of class specific feats often.

Very true. If you want to just plug and play, and get going in 15 minutes without thinking about it too much, D&D is fine. When you start bumping against its limitations, like wanting to take multiple subclasses, it's time to consider a system with more freedom.

I don't need to buy a set of books to give me permission to use my imagination, and I don't need it's permission to disregard rules that don't serve my campaign, or homebrew my own. Every ruleset of every tabletop game is optional. Sure, ignoring some rules can unravel the system, but every table is free to make that choice.

I buy a set of books because I want an exhaustive set of balanced and playtested rules. I am under no obligation to use every rule, but I want to have them so I know if I choose to use them, I'm not going to break the balance.

For instance, I've fully moved to GURPS. It has a reputation for being complicated because there are lots of mechanics available. I ignore the vast majority of them most of the time, but when a player wants to do something out of the ordinary, I can count on having a balanced mechanic available for guidance. I don't have to worry about being too strict, or too lenient, or inconsistent the next time the same situation arises.

5e isn't "permissive", it's lazy game design. I quit after buying the Spelljammer set, which provided basically zero guidance for any of the actual spell jamming stuff. When the answer to every question is "The DM can decide to do it however they want :)”, you're not actually releasing a game system.

Again, I don't need to buy a book to have permission to use my imagination however I want. I buy a book to give me balanced and playtested mechanics. WotC doesn't seem particularly interested in that.

I think it's better to think of all the add-ons and supplements as GM inspiration, rather than hard and fast rules. Most everything in GURPS is set up to arrive at a skill roll or attribute modifier; so even if you don't remember a particular rule for a particular edge case, you can generally eyeball it and come up with a modifier pretty close to what's in the books. The books give a lot of guidance on how to reach that modifier, though; and give you enough information to feel comfortable coming up with your own modifiers outside of what they outline. I feel like that's a lot of what GURPS brings to the table - a simple system, with an internally consistent set of guides about how easy or hard a given action might be.

"Yeah, but neither does the damage I take!" *proceeds to do nothing but play on his phone for the session* - The Hypothetical Fighter I Now Hate

Also, you have an incredibly appropriate username for this conversation. Have you taken steps along the Path of the Muscle Wizard?

(Swipe typing autocorrect turned "steps" into "steroids" three times in a row. I think my phone is becoming sentient.)

I just want to point out, with GURPS templates, players can absolutely get a character ready to go pretty quickly without missing crucial skills or abilities. GURPS's Dungeon Fantasy line comes with a set of templates that mirror D&D's character classes; you follow the guide for your preferred archetype and put together a character that has what you want. If you want to mix and match between them, you just invest the points and pick it up; it even has some guidance on what likely will and won't synergize well.

And if that's still too granular, the Delvers to Grow add-on lets you just select "packs" of upgrades, worth 25 character points each, and tailored to specific templates. This lets you roll up basic characters in about 20 minutes (10 if you know what you're doing!)

Pathfinder 2.0 sidestepped this issue by having class-specific feats instead of subclasses. Just pick which features you want dude, no need to be silly about it. And you get a new choice of class specific feats often.

Took me longer than it should have to realize this was about D&D, not programming.

Gonna be honest, this is like recommending Ubuntu to a Mac user

Warlock: I promised my soul in exchange for great power.

Rogue: To which great power?

Warlock: All of them. Let them fight over it when I am dead.

Fiend: Look, I'll take what I can get. Can I get the legs? I'll take the legs. She can have the top part.

Archfey: Did you just call the head the "top part"? That is so fucked up.