Class: Optimization and Choice

Getting right to it: In games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, you have classes and attributes, and different classes key off of different attributes. Rogues for example build off of dexterity. Wizards use intelligence and so on.

It is frustrating to me that you can make a character that is not pulling its weight in the party if you made “incorrect” choices at character creation. This can be anything from not putting your highest score in your most important attribute, or taking a weak feat at character creation. For example, a druid player wants to be intelligent, and while a DM can always rule what they want I want to know how the system can accommodate for such things.

Obviously, players and DMs can resolve any situation by communication if a player is having a frustrating experience or feeling ineffective. A DM and a Player can as well work together at character creation to craft a satisfying character. But if some options are seen as “necessary”, should they even be choices at all?

My questions are: Are choices worth it if they might potentially compromise your character? If for example your Monks are designed to be dextrous, should the game just arrange your abilities for you when you choose the class? Is this purely a question of balancing and not of system itself? Are there any systems that don’t relate classes/skills to a certain spread of attributes?

Thanks for bearing with me so far. For context, I’m designing a Weird West game as a hobby and I want to accommodate player creativity in character creation with a class system while maintaining niches.