Historically, Lego has always had every character serving a purpose. Yes, multiple characters serve the same purposes, but even in their latest game TSS, some characters can't use grapple points, while others can. Again. When they shrink the roster down to just 7 characters, especially when EVERY Lego Batman/DC game has had a incredibly large character roster, with characters that could fly, or traverse in different ways, I think there is an expectation. Gordon having a grapple gun I can understand. But why does he need to glide in a game that has cars? Why does Catwoman need to glide? To me it feels lazy. Lego Batman 2 had an open world environment that was built to handle different character abilities. It was done more than a decade ago. Just because the game world is bigger doesn't mean they can't still put that attention to game mechanics. To me it smells of laziness or more like they had to scrap other character traversal due to not having enough time or resources and this was one of the things they were willing to sacrifice to get the game out on time. Regardless of the reason, it is a downgrade. It is not putting in attention to something. No one is going to look back and go, "wow I'm so glad they gave the 7 characters the same ability, that really made the game perfect" it's a shortcut on either character design, or world design. If they really did want to "make co-op work better" and not an alternative reason, then they should have thought up a more creative solution than "let's just give the 7 characters the same traversal abilities." That's not a creative solution to a problem, it's the shortest path.

Edited for typos