Unironically, D&D 5e does feats right. You get a precious few and they're build defining, but you never feel forced to take one just to get to a baseline level of effectiveness. PF2 made too many things into feats, and it most results in false choices.I disagree on this.
I feel like Skill feats and Class feats are generally in a good spot with PF2, I like where they are. Although some skills are a bit lacking, generally skills and their feats are good (I'm specifically thinking they probably should have combined Survival skill into something else).
And let's be honest, most of the popular classes in PF1e and 5e alike had what were effectively class feats, despite not officially calling it that. What else do you call a menu of options you pick as you level up, that's unique to your class?
(And yes, Survival should be Nature - Religion and Occultism shows there's no issue with the Knowledge skills having other utility accessible through skill feats, and Nature and Survival skill feats keep eating each other's space)
Then sense motive needs to be split out from perception and either become its own thing or be rolled into the social skills.
There's skills that clearly had preferential treatment in regards to skill feats (Medicine feels like it doesn't have a single bad skill feat, while Nature has like 1 good skill feat and it doesn't even have a legendary-tier skill feat).TBH that can kind of be a double edged sword. Medicine has much stronger skill feats than Nature, but in turn I feel like I get most of what I expect out of nature from just skill increases, while medicine with just skill increases feels kind of bad.
Yeah, but you still have to take skill feats, which if at 3rd or 4th level you take your first increase into Nature and you aren't a primal witch, what feat do you take? I don't remember a single time in my years of playing 3.X, PF1e, and PF2e where the PCs would want to identify a spell, so Assured Identification is pretty much niche. Bonded Animal is a worse pet or familiar. Magical Shorthand as I said doesn't work for you unless you are a primal witch, and while Spirit Speaker is probably the best one it requires the GM to purposefully leave dead animals everywhere for you to use the feat in the first place, which in non-natural areas is going to be harder to justify. I used to max Medicine ASAP because it allowed me to auto-pick skill feats, which my players often did too so we ended up with multiple medics.
I'll probably back up and reply to some stuff from earlier in another post, but the feat thing is easy to comment on:
A lot of feats do feel like they're so required or important that they should just be class features, and sometimes classes have competing "packages" of de-facto feat chains that feel like they may as well be delineated subclasses. I find both really awkward.
Skill feats are both poorly balanced and also kind of frustrating, because part of what determines what skills you want to increase is how good the proficiency-gated feats are. Any skill with bad expert/master/legendary feats just doesn't feel great to increase. I feel like this is a large part of why intimidate continues to feel like such a great skill to take—it has a consistently good set of skill feats.