As in, for example, to your taste?
It could be something simple, like such:
Fighter – Heavily armored warriors
- Weaponmaster
- Tempest
- Battlerager
- Arena Fighter
- Brawler
- Guardian
- Slayer
Rogue – Agile and cunning strikers
- Artful Dodger
- Brutal Scoundrel
- Cunning Sneak
- Ruthless Ruffian
- Swashbuckler
Druid – Master of primal magic
Which mostly is just listing a class' main feature (such as Fighter Talents or Rogue Tactics) and listing them to create a list of the different 'subclasses/options'. Where it gets tricky is where something like the Slayer or the Sentinel comes into the picture, with a different focus/build/role than the main. Not saying that the Slayer needs to be built as a non-daily E-class model still, but a heavily armored striker that isn't an Avenger is desired. Maybe we don't make it a part of the Fighter thing, then, and it really is it's own separate class? Though that itself brings up a point -- Avengers and Paladins are two sides of a coin, and so should they be completely siloed from each other? Or could they share some things somehow?
Maybe making Paladins and Avengers both Divine and Martial as power sources, and in the cleaned up Feat list, we make less class-specific feats, and more feats that are power-source based? So you would have Paladins and Fighters as separate classes for defenders, and Avengers and Slayers (with its own 'sub classes') as separate classes for strikers, and with the appropriate power sources can choose feats for them.
Alternately, we make the classes more modular. As a fighter, you can choose either Combat Challenge or something striker-y as a Feature, along with Tempest/Battlerager/etc. But then that can get messy if we tried to do the same thing with Paladins and Avengers, where Divine Challenge/Sanction requires quite different powers than an Avengers'.
So nix that. Go back to the power source idea. Because the key reason for having three types of Fighters (Weaponmaster, Knight, Slayer) or Druid (Druid, Protector, or Sentinel) is so that they can share feats; even if some of those feats don't apply across all of those class because they often have vastly different features and power structures. So if we can offload that onto a different division such as the power source, then that concern goes away, and we can give each class a stronger name and identity.
(Also, in order to reduce the Feats, if we take those feats that are strictly there to make your class features better and plunk them into the default class as level up choices, that keeps the feat list from getting super long and players from having to scroll past feats that don't have anything to do with them.)
Note that this is all stream of consciousness, so please consider it a starting point and not something necessarily brilliantly all solved or thought through...
