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I was thinking of having a class building system kind of like the Race creation rules in the Advanced Race guide. Every class ability would have a point value and you would then get X amount of points to build your class. I don't know the details still working the concept out. I was wondering what others think of this.
There are systems that do so already. BESM comes to mind. In the end, I find it's too difficult to assign value to abilities--thus, a system like this is bound to produce characters of wildly different power levels. By grouping class abilities together you avoid the pitfalls (akin to putting all of one's eggs in one basket).
I'm not saying it couldn't work--I've often wished for such a system (provided it was balanced)--but, it'd be difficult to build.
There are some benefits to this. The most obvious is the flexibility of concept. You can do anything there is a rule for, without worrying about multiclassing or dealing with class restrictions.
There are also a number of problems.
First and foremost is balance. It is very very hard to balance abilities if you dont know what other abilities will come with it. The more flexible you make the system the more it can be exploited. If you want a great example, look at the summoner. It is the most flexible class in pathfinder with the way the eidolon works (and even that would be a little less flexible then what you are suggesting). If a summoner puts all his eidolons evolution points into combat power, it is a rediculous beast of a class. If he spreads them out among utility and flavor items (like blind sense, or skilled evolutions) the class ends up more in line with the other more powerful classes in the game.
You have to do alot of work to keep things in line OR you end up with lots of luke warm abilities that dont do a whole lot out of fear of things stacking up to high. You might need to put abilities in categories, like offense, defense, other, and restrict how many points can go into each category at each level.
Another problem is time of construction. Putting together anything but very low level npcs takes dms time. The more flexible you make the class, the more time it takes. If most abilities are in packages like current classes, it reduces choices and saves time in constructing npcs. If an npc could take ANY ability or most abilities at every level, you make that process of statting up npcs WAY more time consuming and tedious.
This problem has the double edges sword of wearing down the enthusiasm of existing dms, and of creating a greater entrance criteria for new players. With classes, a new player can make one choice, 'I want to play a rogue' and have instantly reduced all the other choices he could have made by a huge amount. With a completely open system, a new player needs to understand a whole lot more of the game to start picking out abilities that will work.