everytime I mention a shortcoming with the ballence issues in PF I get posts saying "ALL GAMES ARE UNBALANCED! SO THERE!" or "3.0 WAS MOAR BROKEN!" but not all games are AS unbalanced as PF or 3.0 or Rifts (I guess... glitterboy?), no where near it, its not that PF has unbalance, its the extreme level at which it exists.
If one player chooses to make the system squeal with the twisting to get the absolute max lethality... compaired with a character who puts 1/3 his feats into areas for flavor or color of a well thought out backstory, with no real attention to maxing out some specific overpowering aspect of combat. The difference is gigantic.
a noob player should be able to create and level just as strong a character as somebody who uses a guide, or at the very least one who has a 30% chance of knocking down a guide character... it not even close, not by far.
ps if you will never select a weaker ability, and people who do are stupid... why are they even in the game?
and if you tell a player "no" to some aspect of the game (no, you cannot just go buy a +5 vorpal sword, no, you cannot play a thri-kreen) why does that mean you are ruling with an iron fist? the frigging first rule should be "its ok for the DM to say no."
A couple issues with your post, from my own perspective:
We cannot quantify "imbalance", hence we cannot objectively state the level of imbalance from system to system. I've yet to meet a system I can't "break", and systems may exist that I cannot, but in the end "imbalance" is mostly a matter of opinion.
A noob player should NOT do as well as a veteran. The skill gap in a game would be noticeable. A good player should stand out significantly over a not good player. Players in all games should aspire to a level of skill above what they have now, which means the system has to allow that skill ceiling to exist. Even in a cooperative game such as PF and other PnP games, there is always competition and without a system capable of creating gaps between skilled and unskilled players, that competition fails to initialize in a meaningful way.
As a DM, I help my players build both their character's background and their stats. I show them basic synergy between feats, show them how to get the most mileage out of skills or abilities and I show them some magic items that would probably work well with their build.
If there is a significant gap between players, then the DM or Powergamer should be helping the others build their characters.
In my career of DMing, I've found most bad character decisions were not for flavour, they were for lack of understanding of synergy and then explained using flavour later.
Of course, this is all just my opinion on how PnP games are meant to be played. I'm neither right nor wrong.
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The DM saying no also has to be tempered with a DM sometimes allowibng a player to get what he wants. If you give the players too much of what they want it can ruin the game and end up a fisaco. Say no to often an you lose players. To the point you lose too many players and a DM has no game.
I don't force players to min-max. Neither to do I tone down the game for someone who delibrately makes a non-optmized character either. If your going to make choices that make say a monk less effective than the guy optmizing the monk well your on your own. I don't kill players who do so I don' go out of my way to accomodate them either. More often than not they attempt to try and do the same things that a opimized character can do. With negative results.