The fighter has the Base Attack Bonus; his attacks of opportunity will actually hit, while the wizard's will not, if the wizard even bothers holding a weapon in his non-spellcasting hand despite how badly he sucks with it.
And if no enemies provoke AoOs, they're both equal. Nothing the Fighter is doing actually makes him better at anything he can control.

Warblades, despite supposedly having the same flavor as fighters, have to shop a list of maneuvers which they then expend during the fight exactly the way spellcasters shop a list of spells and then expend them. The refreshing mechanic is different, true, but everything is just details;
That little detail is a pretty huge ****ing difference. It's the difference between use an ability once and you can't do it again all day, and doing it once and then to do it again you have to specifically set up an opening to use it again (the swift action+attack Warblades can use).

I mean if you really can't see the huge difference between can refresh and can't refresh, and call it just a trivial detail, I don't know what to say.

the truth is, maneuvers are like spells, in that you have to read what they do to even figure out whether you want to select them.
So what, you just pick whatever feats you think sound cool on your Fighter without reading them? This isn't even an argument. Yes, you are playing a RPG, which is based in books. You might need to read to build an effective character. God forbid!

They complicate the process of character-making, and those complications are for wizards, who would suck if they didn't have those complications.
psst: Fighter's suck without those complications as well. The fact that Fighters don't have useful abilities is why they're sitting all the way down at tier 5.

That's what I think the Fighter should be - a character who is the absolute best in the basic game, who is almost as good without spells as a wizard is with spells, because a wizard can run out of spells, while a fighter never has to track a single expendable resource other than his health and maybe some ammunition if he's a ranged specialist.
What you are asking for is literally impossible. You're asking for a character with no special abilities and nothing but hp and a high attack bonus to compete with a character who can do anything they want.

Expendable resources aren't a limitation when A) The expendable resource is MUCH more powerful than the non-expendable one, and B) The expendable resource is so plentiful that you will not regularly run out past the earliest levels.

Expendable resources are introduced as a way to justify the introduction of more potent abilities, because it allows those abilities to exist without dumbing the game down to "Use your best ability over and over until you win". The fact that Fighters don't have an expendable resource means no matter what build you go with them, they will have a best option and will always use it each round until they win. That's where the boring problem comes in. The fact that their best option just also happens to be on par with the Wizard's weakest options because expendable resources are also more potent is salt in the wound.

And most importantly, expendable resources != spells. Seriously. You know what, real people actually do get fatigued. People fighting real enemies run into the problem that after using a trick on an enemy, they are now looking out for that trick and won't fall for it again without some sort of setup or distraction. You can't actually do the same thing over and over in a fight. If anything, a Fighter with an expendable resource, either to track fatigue, or to track whether an enemy will be open for a particular ability's use, makes more sense than a Fighter who does the same thing every round. Trying to say that doing the same thing every round is more realistic and the only way to not be a spellcaster is so fundamentally wrong I don't know how to describe it.

The Wizard is supposed to bend the rules of reality because he sucks at life and he needs to cheat. The Fighter should be someone who is inherently awesome and doesn't need any help in that department.
Do you honestly think this is what the Wizard and Fighter are in D&D? Because if so you're delluded. Even if you just think that's the ideal, I'd like to hear how you believe what you're saying is even possible. Are we going to restrict a Wizard to a single spell that he can cast only a few times per day? That might be enough to bring him down to the Fighter's level, but even that will depend greatly on the spell.

The Fighter gets six feats in his first three levels, twice what any other character gets in the same range. That isn't a marginal advantage. Some of the feats are definitely excessively weak, but there's a huge list; you can spend your bonus feats on utility stuff, then use your personal feats, which number the same as most classes' total feats, for things that the other classes can't afford because they need utility too. At least in theory.
The Fighter gets 2 feats in his first 3 levels. You measure class against class. The Fighter has 2 feats. The Wizard, cleric, and druid, have first and second level spells. 1 spell level to 1 feat is not really a good exchange rate, because feats are nowhere near potent enough to be worth a whole spell level. And that's ignoring the Wizard's bonus feat and Cleric's channel divinity, and the Druid's animal companion.

I don't see why. All of those those things are excess baggage in what should be a fairly simple basic experience. They should only come into play on rare occasions, and the wizard should live for those.
Defenses are things that come into play on rare occasions? Mobility comes into play on rare occasions? Controlling and disabling enemies come into play on rare occasions?

Maybe if you're saying combat is a rare occasion, but in that case why are we having an argument about the Fighter who is even more useless out of combat than he is in combat? Everything I listed isn't some weird situational thing, it is a core component of how combat is resolved effectively. The Fighter's main problem is he lacks access to these things and is thus largely inneffective.


Nonsense. The fighter has a metric ton of hit points, and can wear the best armor; he can keep fighting until he's down to 1 HP. And the cleric is going to get murdered in his sleep if he spends his spells like they're going out of style.
That metric ton of hit points is 3 more hp per level than the Wizard. 1 more hp per level than the Cleric. And YOU were the one who said the Cleric and Wizard were out of spells when it was the Fighter's turn to shine.

Oh like the CR system is balanced in the first place. I always use under-CRed encounters because killing the party is no good for anyone. Plus high-level monsters tend to have absurd numbers of SLAs, none of them defined in the statblock, which makes them a pain in the rear to run.
I think we hit your problem and the reason why you think Fighters are fine. Seriously under-CRed monsters and ignoring SLAs because it's too hard to run? Well yeah, if you play softball with the group and pretend enemy casters don't exist, then all that's left is a couple of people beating each other up. But the rest of us are actually playing the game that was written, using powerful monsters and taking advantage of their abilities, and that means that plain ordinary Fighters with their basic attack and 20ft move speed are basically dead weight.