I've seen so many times how my guildmates were forced by the game & its "balance" to delete their secondary classes and pick meta ones just to be useful during runs and it hurts me seeing that after so much time this hasn't changed.
Simply not true. Not everyone is playing meta classes, some are even picking the non-meta ones and get really decent damage out of them. Most of them are dependant of other classes or support, but every class is playable. From a MDPS point of view I see only a few classes that are way behind others, like M/Wd, M/D, D/M (if this can be seen as dps) and that's it I guess. On the other hand there are like 20+ playable classes for mdps.
Most dps players in this game want to deal the max damage possible at any cost. That's why you possibly see same classes in random runs. Reality is that most players play the 1 class only that is 2% above another. For dps reason it makes no sense to play a weaker class, at least in most situations.
In our guild runs you constantly see leather players on the same classes, while chain and cloth are switching through the entire number of classes. My personal favorite class is S/Wl. Do you see any S/Wl in other runs? I don't. But its damage is pretty good and there is a huge damage potential in this class. So why does not anyone play it always? Because of instance, gear, skill, buffs, cenedrils, pet, cards, titles, support and all the other reasons why classes deal damage differently. If all classes were the same in all situations, you would not need any balance and stay at the vanilla balancing, which always sucked more balls than a billard table. 
And then you see other servers having that exactly same vanilla balancing and people are like "this balancing is so cool, it feels nostalgic" and you think they are all cavemen who are very excited about a light bulb but have never seen the sun... (if ppl like oldschool content, go play nostalgia instances, it's the same look and feel, but just the values of damage, hp, etc are different).
Why balancing was good in the early days of rom? Because the game was naked then. Almost only gear and TP mattered here. Nowadays the game grew up, got a lot of more stuff to calc in.
I always was pretty critical about coa balancing (and still am, since on some classes we're just cycling all over again) but reality is that you find no other server with a more diversified balancing at all. 
Some more walls are turned off / hidden for later changes I already planned.
