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For a home game, yeah I tend to restrict players to books I actually have access to.I don't get this. Not one bit.
All you need to know (aside from universal game rules from Core) is: what's on my character sheet.
Let's imagine you don't own the APG and I ask to play a witch. You don't need to know anything about the alchemist, the inquisitor, piecemeal armor, or anything else in the APG. Only the witch. The burden is on me to provide you the list of hexes I want to learn, and to provide you access to them to read. Welcome to open game content. You get to refuse anything that seems broken, presumably with some discussion in case you're misinterpreting how something actually works.
While I'm playing a witch, you can forget about the books you DO own that I'm not playing. They're not important.
If it is too much to ask that you - as DM - learn four character sheets that draw on sources you don't own... I dunno what to say.
I've had bad experiences in the past with people wanting to play things the GM doesn't have the books for. In an old 2nd edition game I ran online years ago I had one player who refused to play anything except a psychic. When I told them "no" because I didn't have the complete psychic handbook, they immediately linked a microsoft word document which they claimed was the book they wanted to use. I had no way of knowing if it was a copying of the actual book, or information made up by the person who sent the link. But reading over the "rules" they linked, their planned character would have had no real limits or limitations. To use any of their powers they would have to make a Int check, rolling less then their Int on a D20. They had 18 Int, supposedly what they rolled naturally using their own dice (instead of the site's dice roller like I said to use) using 3d6 down the line. A failed Int check meant the power went off, but cost them a point from their psychic pool. I successful check meant the power went off at no cost.
I've gamed with other people who rely on the GM not having the book they're using too. One guy knew the GM didn't have Advanced Class Guide, so preferred playing classes from that book. His synergist summoner's endolen never got banished, even if he's personally down to 1 HP and the summoned critter's HP has been long since depleted. His magus would stack multiple elemental imbues on his weapon at the same tme, and spend far more arcane points then he actually should have. His alchemist was having his scorpion familiar mix infusions together with his mutagen so he'd get his mutagen bonuses, Growth, and Bull's Strength at the same time when drinking it, then dump the mixture down his throat so he can still act the same turn this happened.
No matter how closely I read the alchemist class, I'm not seeing anything that would allow that. But he claimed this was a feature specific to an alchemist having a scorpion as a familiar.
There's been other examples too from too many different games and systems. Thus in a home game I wont let someone use something unless I have access to the book being used. PFS is a different story, but I'll be expecting the person to have a copy of any rules they are using on hand.
What is bloat? I keep hearing about it, but I've yet to actually see it.
I think the definition of bloat that most people use in this context is when:
1) There are many redundant options in the ruleset, as in, things that do the same thing in a very similar way. For example, how finely granulated do classes and archetypes need to be when many archetypes amount to trading off one class's feature(s) for those of another class? At some point it'd be more efficient to go classless.
2) The bad options outnumber the good ones by a large proportion (this might be called a subset of 1). For example, there are many, many Style Feats out there, and I would bet dollars to pesos that <10% of them see >90% of the use.
3) The rules are more complicated than they need to be. For example, Animal Companions were implicitly able to Flank and Aid Another until those were defined as Tricks.
The absolute number of options doesnt necessarily imply bloat. People who like rules-light systems, for example, think the D&D 3e ruleset is bloated from the get-go.
Personally, I think Pathfinder is bloated, that bloat is not a good thing, but also that bloat is very difficult to avoid. How can it be avoided?
1) Stop publishing rules. Not an option for commercial purposes.
2) Ensure every rule you publish doesn't qualify as redundant according to the above criteria. Very difficult for even a good designer to do, and possibly, also not an option for commercial purposes.
3) Limit the scope of your game to something that a lean and tight ruleset can cover, with the right mix of abstraction and versimilitude to satisfy most players. The problem with this is that a tabletop RPG is not a game with a limited scope, which is a big part of their appeal in the first place. Trying to run a broad game with a narrow system either puts a lot more work on the DM to make up his own rules to fill in the gaps, or the game devolves into Magical Tea Party, or Calvinball.