Hacking 5e D&D

Per my prior post, I am not completely thrilled with the way experience is awarded in 5th edition D&D, and the way that the narrow focus awarding of experience dictates gameplay (intentionally or not). This begs the question of what else I am not completely thrilled with. Which in turn leads to the inevitable: If I was to re-do ("hack") certain parts of D&D, which parts might that be?

Experience points, to be sure. Backgrounds, maybe. Skills, yes. Combat proficiencies, yes.

Backgrounds. So what's wrong with backgrounds? Nothing, fundamentally, but they seem to exist only for the purpose of bestowing a few additional skills at the point of character creation. We used them, and took the resulting skills and languages, but that seems to be about as far as the use of them went. Some of the backgrounds seem odd in all but a few narrowly interpreted uses. This might be more of a result of the fact that we haven't fully immersed ourselves in the roleplaying aspects of the game, but backgrounds seem artificial to me. All things considered though, this is more of a minor quibble compared to some of my other issues.

Skills. The problem? Too many characters are too good at too many things right from the start of the game. I'm more of the view that "adventuring type" skills should be earned through the experience of gameplay (i.e adventuring) and not in effect be bestowed at birth. This is compounded by the omnipresent "proficiency bonus" which is used for a multitude of purposes in the game. As it stands now, most characters will have a plethora of bonuses based on their 6 ability scores, plus more proficiencies from their race choice, and more proficiencies from their background choice. This is way too many starting skills that were never earned.

Combat proficiencies. Non-fighter types are simply too good at fighting. Spell casters are clearly overpowered compared to melee types at higher levels (as they always have been). The flip side of this should be that hand to hand combat should be the one place where fighter types outshine their spellcasting brethren. This doesn't necessarily happen. In our specific case, we have a very high Dexterity wizard and a very high Dexterity rogue who are just as good at hitting and dealing damage (if not better in some cases) than our fighter types. Granted, they have much lower armor classes and are thus easier to hit and damage, but still...

What to do about these, if anything? I'm not sure. Some of these are fundamental to the design of 5e D&D, and the unintended domino effect of messing around with them could break our game. But it is fun to think about.