You know what the real problem here is? The Character Builder has trained a whole generation of gamers that if you can't create a whole new character in like 2 minutes, that something is now somehow wrong.
The fact that many of you actually make the complaint that "Ugh, I don't want to have to sift through 1000 feats to find the one I want" is laughable to me.
Just to be clear - I made the same complaint in 3rd Edition, before the CB was even in the picture. (To be fair, I made it much more often those days about spells, and trying to figure out spells what my Cleric wanted to memorize that day - but it did come up with feats as well.)
So I don't think that "wanting to keep char-gen as efficient as possible" is the product of the Character Builder. Instead, rather, it is the result of... players wanting to spend more time playing, and less time doing homework to research what their options are.
How long does it REALLY take to go through the Character Builder to find different feats? Considering that they are already divided up into categories, those that don't apply to your character don't show up, and most of you already know the half-dozen feats you're going to take anyway because of your "feat tax" beliefs... how long does it take to go through what's left? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? Even if it's an HOUR... you usually have what... A WEEK between sessions in which to level up your character? And you can't spend any scanning through the Feat list?
I'm willing to spend time looking through options. I do wish that the ways of doing so were more efficient. Man, my biggest complaint about the Compendium - if I search for feats, it doesn't list their pre-reqs in the list. It would be really, really nice if I could search for "Ranger feats" and then immediately skip over the 90% of them that require other races or builds or ability scores or a parrot animal companion or whatever.
Can I still scan through them anyway? Sure. And the CB has a better, if still imperfect, sorting system... marred, somewhat, by the sluggish performance of the CB in looking through those feats one by one.
But the fact I can spend the time looking it all up doesn't mean I
want to. Again, I am simply amazed at some of the responses here. "Just man up and spend an hour looking through feats!
Real gamers wouldn't complain about this sort of thing!"
The fact that I can put up with inconvenience doesn't mean I wouldn't rather not have to do so.
What's the point of leveling up a character at all if you DON'T want to spend an hour or so deciding what to do for him? Isn't that supposed to be the FUN part of leveling? Getting to look through all the options available and making decisions on how you want your character to be? You take that away... then the whole reason for the leveling process goes away too. You might as well just hit the "auto-level" button and be done with it.
I admit, this is a slight tangent. I'm not sure if people are actually arguing that they want the feat list reduced to 3 automatic options or whatever. That's not my goal, by any means. I think there
are existing feats out there that are unneeded and get in the way. But there is a difference between wanting a more efficient overall list and wanting it stripped down to nothing. I'm not going to say that 2,000 feats is a better total than 6,000 - I honestly don't know.
But I think it perfectly possible to argue for both the removal of the 'feat taxes' while also wanting the feat list to be trimmed down a bit as well.
As it is, I like a diverse array of options. I'd certainly prefer the current options for sorting through those choices were more effective, so I could spend the time actually comparing choices instead of waiting for the page to load a feat only to discover I don't qualify for it anyway.
But while I'm sure this is certainly connected to the overall discussion, I'm not sure you could really claim this is the heart of the problem in any way. It seems relatively tangential, at best.