Crusader: You constantly refer to slightly unbalanced classes or a perceived difference in effectiveness as "useless". In any situation where someone is contributing to the group effort, that is not useless.
He's not refering to slightly unbalanced classes. He's refering to an unbalanced system period. 3.5 is unbalanced, and needs to be fixed. Pathfinder isn't getting the job done (if anything, they are making the most broken parts worse, and the weakest parts weaker).
Contribution means you are doing something to affect the enemy negatively, or to affect your allies positively. While this is extremly loose, doing some number-crunching can determine if you are helping your friends or hurting your enemies. If the numbers show that you could be doing something better than the current action you are planning on (such as casting Grease on the enemy's weapon to make them Save or lose a turn and give everyone a free attack on the enemy when they pick up their weapon, rather than casting Haste which only gives half of that), then you are being less useful than you can be. If you are not being as useful as possible, then you will likely end up dead in DnD. Due to this logic, anyone not opperating at their fullest capacity (or doing their best when forced into a reduced capacity, such as the Wizard who's spellbook is stolen) is deemed useless.
Ever been in a game where the enemy has 1 hit point left and makes its save against the casters spell? That's when you wish you had a fighter around dealing an extra dozen or so points of damage per attack.
It isn't about the Save or Dies, you know. From personal experience and from number crunching, Wizards will cast maybe two to four spells in one combat. For the rest of the encounter, they will sit back and smoke a blunt or use Wands of MM to contribute. Why? Because they've all ready shut down the enemy with those few spells. They don't need to go all-out and unload two spells a round in order to contribute to the combat (they likly all ready have).
And I have been in the above situation, sort of. We didn't have a spellcaster, but we did have a Meldshaper, two Martial Adepts, a Ranger, and a Binder. It turned out that the Meldshaper was the MVP of that party (guess why).
You structure your arguments in terms of black and white, right and wrong. For all your griping about trolls, strawmen, attacks, and "stupidity", you yourself leap to foregone conclusions on a frequent basis. For example, you present evidence that the fighter does not deal as much damage as it should. Your conclusion? The fighter is "useless". You should really take a second look at the language you use to present your ideas - because that is what they are, ideas and opinions. Like it or not, most things in this world are not factual. It doesn't contribute anything to claim you are always right except a perceived unwillingness to listen to other people.
The world is gray.
DnD is not grey when it comes to things like power levels. It looks more like a bag of Warheads. Everything that is blue is magically delicious, and everything that is Yellow is made of fail.
He isn't leaping to conclusions. His arguments are based on actual numbers that mean something rather than personal opinion. He's even shown several examples of those numbers to try and prove his points (and every time, those numbers are ignored unless they are Damage=1000+).
The Fighter is underpowered, and Pathfinder is just making them worse. We can put numbers up to prove this, if you would like.