I feel very vindicated now, because your issues with D&D are exactly the same as my issues.
Though, also, I don't love class-based systems, and especially not the way D&D does it where some classes are a full-on profession/vocation while others are just a collection of skills that anyone should be able to learn.
If I had to go with a class-based system I'd probably go with something like Earthdawn - there are a collection of Talents and every class gets easy access to X many of them. You level them up with XP, and when you've reached a given threshold of X number of Talents at Y level, your class levels up and you get access to other Talents. So you can either be a broad generalist or a focused specialist or somewhere in between, and two characters of the same class might look very different from each other in terms of abilities while still having the same fundamental theme and role.
As for Magic, well, I couldn't phrase it any better than your "there is no possible universe in which Vancian Magic is the most realistic option" because no, there really is not.
I quite like Shadowrun's take on Magic - it doesn't use a Mana/Spell Pool system, it makes you resist drain (which inflicts damage every time you fail to resist it.) So you can throw low-power/low-drain spells around near-indefinitely, if you're relatively powerful, but you've still only got a few really high-powered spells in you before you fall over with your brain leaking out your nose.
I do like the BtVS take on magic, and it works really well for that setting where magic is supposed to be risky and potentially unreliable. I think one thing so many people discount is the way that the setting should influence the mechanics, and the way that the wrong mechanics will work against whatever flavour you're trying for.
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I feel very vindicated now, because your issues with D&D are exactly the same as my issues.
Though, also, I don't love class-based systems, and especially not the way D&D does it where some classes are a full-on profession/vocation while others are just a collection of skills that anyone should be able to learn.
If I had to go with a class-based system I'd probably go with something like Earthdawn - there are a collection of Talents and every class gets easy access to X many of them. You level them up with XP, and when you've reached a given threshold of X number of Talents at Y level, your class levels up and you get access to other Talents. So you can either be a broad generalist or a focused specialist or somewhere in between, and two characters of the same class might look very different from each other in terms of abilities while still having the same fundamental theme and role.
As for Magic, well, I couldn't phrase it any better than your "there is no possible universe in which Vancian Magic is the most realistic option" because no, there really is not.
I quite like Shadowrun's take on Magic - it doesn't use a Mana/Spell Pool system, it makes you resist drain (which inflicts damage every time you fail to resist it.) So you can throw low-power/low-drain spells around near-indefinitely, if you're relatively powerful, but you've still only got a few really high-powered spells in you before you fall over with your brain leaking out your nose.
I do like the BtVS take on magic, and it works really well for that setting where magic is supposed to be risky and potentially unreliable. I think one thing so many people discount is the way that the setting should influence the mechanics, and the way that the wrong mechanics will work against whatever flavour you're trying for.