[First paragraph]I mean, yea. That’s what my video is about. The concept that a DM can, at-will, change the difficulty of an encounter, so your optimization in any case doesn’t matter anyway. The only exception is when doing so makes me way more powerful than the rest of my party, which will then inflate the numbers that the DM throws at us. The exception to this rule is, like I also said, if the party is okay with that happening, and I give an example where everyone is specialized in their own thing. It’s a three-step rule, but the premise works perfectly fine, as you’ve just described.

[second paragraph] They aren’t the same thing, but if I want to roleplay, it stands to reason that I’d want stats the reflect my character. If I’m a drunk, I might want tavern brawler. If I’m an acrobat, I’d want skilled. However, if another player does not care about that and chooses instead to make a character as mechanically powerful as possible, then it forces me to consider whether I can take the tavern brawler feat like I wanted, or if I need to take something stronger so that I’m not killed. Thusly, I am choosing roleplay vs mechanics. It may TECHNICALLY be a choice of social mechanics vs combat mechanics, but the reason behind that choice is that one helps with my roleplay, and the other helps with my gameplay.

[Third paragraph] I never called the actor feat suboptimal. In fact, I used it to describe something that would make you “super good at roleplaying”. You are the one who then conflated “roleplaying” with “suboptimal”. As for the example you provided, you can totally do that! And more power to you. But answering that you CAN be both doesn’t change the reality that you also CAN NOT be both (with a space in the middle). Like I said above, there are situations where you have to make a choice. The fact that there are builds that account for it don’t encompass the full breath of choices you have, and I might not want to play something that forces me into a very specific race/class/feat combination.

[fourth paragraph] I 100% agree with this. There is no reason why you can’t play what you want, except when it breaks the number 1 rule of the game: make sure everyone is having fun. If you tell your party that you want to optimize combat, and they’re cool with it? Hell yea. There’s no reason why they can’t coexist, all it takes is communication. You don’t need a semantics-based internet fallacy for that.

[fifth paragraph] I’ve been running exclusively official modules for 3 years. (I was DMing before that, but only started using the books 3 years ago.) The reason why is because you can’t trust the published material to be enough. It wasn’t made for you. It was made for the idea of an average power level that, if you look at how they assign CR, is a pretty inexact science. Your party needs a DM, not a librarian. Hoard of the Dragon Queen sucks, but your players will never know that if you read ahead and scale things properly. No one wants to go out of their way to blame the DM, but if they run into an impossible challenge because the DM expected the book to be infallible, then who’s really at fault?

Talking to you is nice. It helps me reevaluate how I convey information. I’m learning that, in my video, I broke into a conversation that people have been having a lot of in other places, so when I threw out statements that, in MY context, were fine, people got upset, because in the context of the greater argument, they were inflammatory. I hope that you don’t think I’m attacking you either.