truemane:
while keeping most of the core imbalances (underpowered monks, overpowered wizards) almost entirely unchanged.
I get where you're coming from with this, but the first is impacted by a number of factors, including realism, and the second is a genre conceit. The only games that tend to put a monk on an even footing with an armed fighter for straight-up fighting are Eastern oriented games where the mythical kung-fu monk is a thing. The typical Western slant of D&D-ish games makes that unrealistic, and the rules tend to reflect it. That's not to say that you can't pull off some interesting things with a PF monk that put them on par with a regular fighter in terms of overall power, they're just not going to be straightforward.
As for wizards being the most powerful, PF continued the trend that 2e->3e->3.5 started and flattened out the wizard power curve a good bit. 2e had wizards that went from "cast, cast, useless" at low level to "you are all now my hirelings" at high level. 3e and later 3.5 toned down a lot of the top end as well as shoring up the bottom end, but PF took it even farther with the way they handled schools and tweaked a number of the spells. The full casters are still the top end of the power curve at high level, but that's a genre conceit. No matter how hard a guy can hit something, that's just never going to compare to the guy who makes reality twist with a few words. What PF has done, mostly, is make everyone else more interesting to play. They may not be as powerful, but they certainly have options and niches that the pure-caster does not.
PF classes are, on the whole, better designed than 3.5e classes. They're also stronger, but the biggest gain is in being more interesting. In PF, there are actual reasons to play a fighter past second level, just as there are reasons not to exit your cleric/wizard class as soon as possible for a PRC.
One of the biggest things that D&D has struggled with post 3.5 is figuring out how to have healing without turning characters into mindless healbots (which was an issue from 2e through 3.5). PF's channel energy is, probably, the best solution I've seen. 4e used healing and hit dice and now 5e is using hit dice (though the in-combat healing is back to semi-healbot status where a caster that can cast Cure Wounds has to think carefully about every spell they cast - because that's a heal they won't have later).
Not to digress too much, but the reason I don't like 5e is actually very much to do with the aforementioned power curve - but in a different way. In this week's game, my learned scholar character, with all sorts of knowledge and linguistic skills, had to have a ritual explained to him by the party's fighter due to bad dice rolls. The difference between "good" at something and "terrible" at something is so small that it's easy for the worst person to overshadow the best person in a situation just due to the dice. This wasn't an issue in previous editions.