Except ALL of this rings true about the vanilla game. You have absolute choice in how to build characters as there are few restrictions. Stealing your words for a moment: "You can turn Cloud into a pure melee fighter, balanced or pure mage, for example. You can turn certain characters into glass cannons, tank mages, offensive mages, etc"...You can do all that vanilla with the correct materia and equipment setup. What New Threat does here is allow you to select certain attributes to specialize in which actually forces a character into a particular class type rather than being solely defined by materia and equipment that you can swap into a completely different build at any time by selectively swapping out Materia (e.g all greens and reds = cloud is a mage. All purples and yellows = cloud is a fighter). I love permanent meaningful choices, C&C, class specialization and all that stuff so I consider NT's SP system a net positive, yet not without downsides and you're not quite accurate in your summary here. Vanilla is highly diverse in the builds/characters you can create, and the fact that the builds you can create are never permanent should be considered a positive; a different kind of positive to traditional RPG builds that force you down a specific role with specialization. There is in fact more freedom to build characters in the vanilla game. You can set up a team of all fighters, discover that strategy for a particular boss doesn't work, and swap immediately to all mages regardless of character/party. This is an extreme example of course but it highlights the ultimate build freedom the original game gave you by not forcing any characters down any particular path. I don't think people understand that they're blank slates by design, which allows you to customize them at any time as you see fit. Use tifa as a mage for half the game, decide later she should be a fighter and no problem, you can do that without issue. That is your choice. Still, overall I believe NT to be the better option because specialisation forces more long-term strategy, and having direct permanent influence over attributes is always fun. Nonetheless, the vanilla RPG systems are great in the level of freedom provided. You the player defined the characters as you saw fit at any time and little got between that concept, not even permanent attribute specialization.
