When game designers try to take things back
Have you noticed this?
When a game designer notices that a specific feature doesn't really do what he wants, but instead of errata-ing it out, he keeps trying to sort of phase it out.
One of the earlier examples that caught my attention was the Destiny mechanic in Star Wars Saga edition. It seems obvious that as the system progressed, game designers regretted having put it there, likely thinking it was too powerful, and kept trying to offer different mechanics to replace it, such as the legacy mechanic and backgrounds.
The problem was, legacies, while cool, didn't give you the same sense of accomplishment and growth as destinies, and backgrounds, while also cool and interesting for customization, were just way way less powerful than destinies, so no players wound up using otherwise cool ideas.
I've noticed the same thing in Pathfinder recently. They keep offering the rogue cool archetypes that trade out trapfinding, for instance, and they also keep offering bard less powerful alternatives to Inspire Courage.
I guess it just bothers me that a) they only offer us something cool by making us give up something we don't want to give up, putting that cool thing out of reach and b) they're not willing to stand up and say they may have made a mistake to begin with.