Vertical growth is so fucking boring, let characters grow horizontally too with access to more options
This here is an actual good post in this joke of a thread and somewhat gets to the ground of the OP's problem.
His issue isn't with character development itself, but with huge gaps of vertical growth. The low levels being boring because they're too arbitrary, and the high levels being boring because they're too roflstompy.
Which doesn't mean vertical progression is bad. There should be vertical progression. Going from a normal dude with a sword who gets raped by wolf packs to a dragonslayer with the most bling armor in the empire is cool. Gothic 2 does it right. Gothic 2 also has a good enough combat system that you can still get fucked by a group of lower level enemies at a high level if you act like an absolute retard. Unlikely, but possible. And the satisfaction of
finally being able to kill a shadowbeast after it has managed to kill you with two hits for the last 5 hours of game time is wonderful. The whole "you get fucked up by enemies, but then you progress in your skills, stats, and equipment until you can finally fuck them up yourself".
Gothic 2 also has a nice structure, with harder enemies guarding the approach to more difficult areas, so as your skills grow, the world becomes more open, you can explore more freely. Properly designing and placing your encounters is very important if you want to make progression feel good. There should always be another challenge lurking around the corner. In fact, enemy and encounter design is elementary for good progression: there should be challenging but doable encounters for level 1 characters that don't just boil down to "miss, miss, miss, crit and dead". If combat boils down to that at low levels, either the system is shit or the encounter design is shit. And while I wouldn't say D&D is bad, I do think that it's better suited to pen and paper games than PC games and you can develop a better system that's more interesting at low levels. Still, you can design good encounters at low level D&D, too. The generic "group of 5 xvarts" encounter of Baldur's Gate 1 is not one of those.
If your encounter design is actually good, low levels will feel fun enough to not be a chore, mid-levels are the most interesting by default, sure, and high levels can also be fun if you do your encounter design right. BG2's high level expansion Throne of Bhaal isn't shit because it's high level. It's shit because most encounters boil down to "here's three giants with HP bloat and high damage attacks lol", which is an uncreative and boring encounter type. But then there's also Demogorgon in Watcher's Keep, which is a genuinely challenging and fun encounter that has you play around with high level spells a lot.
So OP's #1 issue is more easily solved by good encounter design, rather than by eliminating progression. What he's really asking for is that all encounters in a game should be as fun as those cool BG2 dungeons with varied enemy groups, enemy adventurer parties, monsters with special abilities etc. Well yes. All encounters in the game should be that good. The solution isn't to fix the party at level 12 and design all encounters around level 12, and have no other levels in the game whatsoever. That defeats the entire purpose, because then we end up with a boring game where everything stays at the same level. It's actually detrimental to variety. When OP claims that there's one level at which the game is best (and he's almost certainly referring to D&D with the "miss, miss, crit" criticism of early levels, so I'll refer to the D&D system here), he doesn't actually mean that. He means there's a certain
level range at which the game is best. Usually, most people consider levels 5-12 to be the best since at those levels you got a lot of cool spells, items, and abilities while nothing is ridiculously overpowered yet. At the lower edges of that level range you are still threatened by groups of bandits and orcs, and at the higher edges you can encounter iconic D&D monsters like illithids, beholders, dragons etc.
If you were to remove progression entirely and just fix the levels of everything at level X, you'd remove this kind of variation. You could hightail it to the end boss and kill him right away because every encounter has to be doable at any point during the game. There is no going through sidequests to get enough XP to be strong enough for the next main quest boss. The whole point of the genre would be defeated. Yes, you can narrow down the level range to make progression less drastic, but you can't remove it entirely without killing the essence of what is an RPG. Make the player progress from fighting groups of orcish raiders to fighting a cult of evil wizards supported by beholders, rather than making it progress from killing lowly goblins to slaying bigass dragons. But there still needs to be some kind of progression, or it wouldn't be a proper RPG anymore.
Now, to frajaq's point that I quoted above: adding horizontal progression to a character, rather than purely vertical, makes things a lot more interesting and can alleviate the problem of leveling up just being about raising stats. D&D 3.5's feats are pretty good for that, or Fallout's perks. New abilities that go beyond simply adding +1 to your armor, hit chance, or damage. Things like whirlwind attack that make a fighter more useful for crowd control, adding more versatility to the character. Fallout's animal friend that lets you totally avoid combat with animals in Fallout 1 and 2 (™). The thieving abilities that allow you to do a whole new questline in Gothic 2, which you can't do without them. Things like that. Horizontal progression, the addition of new abilities to your characters that allow for new approaches, can be even more fun than purely vertical progression and there should be more games and systems that do this kind of thing.
