Why play a Fighter?

[Cosi]

The idea that the Fighter is a simple class is pretty obviously wrong. There are hundreds of Fighter feats, and almost all of them can be selected as any given bonus feat. Making a Fighter at all requires winnowing a combinatoric explosion of truly impressive proportions down to a single path. Making an effective Fighter is even harder, because you have to do that, and you have to know which paths are good (for example, tripping and charging) and which similar paths are not (for example, sundering and disarming). A simple class is something like a Beguiler where, with the exception of Advanced Learning, the class is almost wholly deterministic once you've started it. Barbarians are the simple martial class, at least in the PHB.

In theory, yes. In practice, this almost never comes up because the new player is going to get their character built for them anyway.

Plenty of players are going to want to build their own character, without someone else doing it for them.

Yes, 3e has a problem with class complexity. You want three kinds of classes:

1. Simple to build, simple to play. For noobs, or people who simply aren't interested in deep engagement with the mechanical parts of the game. Examples in 3e: none if you also condition on effectiveness, Barbarian, Warmage, and similar if you do not.
2. Simple to build, complex to play. For people who enjoy the tactical challenge of having a variety of abilities, but not the research required to build complicated characters. Examples in 3e: Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, Druid (to a degree, depends on how you count Wild Shape and Animal Companion), Cleric.
3. Complex to build, complex to play. For optimizers, or other people who enjoy exploring complex systems. Examples in 3e: Wizard, Sorcerer.

If you're attentive, you'll notice that I left out "complex to build, simple to play", but I think characters like that probably don't have much of an audience. Of course, these are all sliding scales. The Sorcerer is probably harder to build than the Wizard (because you have less resources to work with), but it's simpler to play for that exact reason. And once you have those categories, you should make sure that broad categories of character like "sword guy" and "spell guy" are represented in all of them. 3e has very few magical classes that are simple to play, and very few complex martial classes. That's bad, and its something the game should fix going forward.

Of course it is, and that banal point (the game is flawed, zomg) has been made in threads like these repeatedly.

Remember kids, if you really love something, you'll ignore all its flaws and insult anyone who acknowledges them! Fun exercise: imagine how Psyren's position sounds if you apply it to people, then die a little inside.

ToB requires knowledge of a whole new subsystem, so I don't know that I'd agree it's noob-friendly.

Wat? If you're a noob, everything is a new subsystem to you, because you don't know any subsystems. We can talk about the complexity of ToB versus the complexity of whatever else, but that's a different debate (and one that looks much worse for Fighters).