Pathfinder itself is pretty much "Josh Sawyer redesigns D&D 3.5
Grunker is that true
Well, not really, but I can sort of see the logic behind it: a) Pathfinder basically takes A LOT of extraneous rules "compilations" and codifies them into actual systems. The perfect example is Combat Maneuver Bonus instead of 3.5's mess of different rules (basically, Grapple, Trip, Bull Rush etc. all worked under individually unique rules in 3.5). How anyone could have anything against that is a mystery though. b) Pathfinder tones down (i.e. balances) a lot of the most obvious abuse-cases and more importantly: buffs a lot of the weakest classes. Rogue sneak attacks used to be utterly useless since everything was immune for lore reasons, and it is very sawyerist to dispel this immunity in service of game balance (i.e. make rogues actually fun to play...), ignoring "fluff"/lore issues. c) Pathfinder reduces rules diversity marginally in favor of game balance, strengthens core classes (meaning leveling in a single class can compete more with a sprawl of multiclassing, thus reducing the imperative to multiclass, though by no means nullifying it) and makes sure almost every level of experience has something unique to make progression more worthwhile - also an explicit Sawyer tactic.
I think one part where Pathfinder misses is that a lot of its prestige classes are neither interesting nor as strong as core classes - this was done on purpose to reduce the strength of 3.5's strictly stronger prestige classes (compared to core classes), but they overcompensated in many cases.
I guess on paper all of these things are pretty sawyerist, but where Pathfinder still defies sawyerism is that it still puts rules diversity squarely above game balance. As you know I think the design wars are pretty stupid, the important thing in systems design is to craft something which actually does the job it's trying to accomplish. 3.5's "job", its main strength, is having an insane variety, and Pathfinder is an attempt to preserve that while lessening the issues that variety causes, and I think they succeeded well in this, which is why I love the system. You still have a completely unbalanced system that skewers actual play so hard towards offence and against defense that initiative becomes ludicrisly important at high levels, but such things are the price you pay for such an amount of complexity, and Pathfinder pays a very low price in complexity reduction compared to how much better it works in actual play. (Incidentally, the problem of offense vs. defence and 1 Round Combat is why I support Kingmaker's choice to give absurd bumps to static defenses on harder difficulties - it's a very inelegant solution, but it beats the alternative of having milisecond combat, and PF:K's combat is already among the fastest in the genre on mid to high levels). To solve it would require iteration upon iteration with so much depth, and seeing as Pathfinder is already an iteration of one of the most iterated-upon systems in RPG history, it's probably not tenable to expect more
In that vein, I don't find the system very "sawyerist" because Sawyer would NEVER design a system with that amount of variety at the cost of game balance. So Pathfinder may have applied slightly sawyerist ideas to 3.5 (some of which are an objective good imo, like codifying the maneuver system), but the system itself is anything but sawyerist.
