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I never found that shaman were all that unpopular; it always seemed to me more that there were an assload of druids all over the place that made shaman and clerics look uncommon by comparison.
For a long time early on, the first year or two of the game, mages and necromancers were all over the place. Like druids, that was because they were powerful solo classes. Then, once raiding really became a thing for people other than a few of the most hardcore players out there, necros and mages dropped way off in popularity. Pets weren't wanted on raids, and neither class did impressive damage without the pet compared to Wizards. Enchanters became more popular when A) the playerbase figured out what they were supposed to do and B) just how powerful what they did really was.
Coro is right, the enchanter does not fit into PVP because either what he does is really effective (and no fun for everyone else) or else what he does is inconsistently or infrequently effective (balanced, but no fun for the enchanter). The enchanter also creates the problem, much like Warrior defensive discipline does, that encounters have to be balanced around him. If the enchanter can mez everything and slow everything, he either trivializes every encounter or else encounters are impossible without him. Similarly, dropping mob damage by 30% means every encounter had to be based on a warrior tanking it. Cleric CH did the same thing; encounters had to be based on clerics healing the tank which made them too hard for druids and shaman to fill the same role (although they didn't have it as bad since both could do regens, and later on got mini-CHs of their own).
Anyhow, the point is that a lot of classes in EQ had vices. Scratch that, practically every class had an annoying vice of some sort. Warriors? Couldn't really do anything but tank in a group; they could barely get to the group unescorted. In some cases, the vice the class had was the people playing it. Enchanters were a bad offender there, so were druids and rogues. Rogues tended to attract anyone that A) wanted to play melee B) wanted to tank and C) wanted to use their DPS output to loot-whore. Druids tended to attract people who wanted to kite mobs to max level then couldn't find their *** with both hands in a raid, and enchanters tended to attract (and in some cases, create) control freaks who thought everything revolved around them. I noticed distinct changes in the behavior and manner of at least two people that switched to Enchanter.
Not that everyone, or even most people playing those classes were like that, but when those personalities appeared, they tended to gravitate to those classes. You'd find some of the "I want to solo my way to raiding" types in mage and necromancer, but not as many because they weren't as handy on raids as a healer, and also didn't teleport around.
EQ had a lot of class issues that people would talk about as "balance" but they weren't really balance issues. Some were, but necromancer pets not being wanted on raids wasn't an issue of balance; it was an issue of the AI of the time. Had the pets been more controllable and less prone to causing the problems they caused, the class would have been just fine for balance. Monks weren't unbalanced; the gear they had was unbalanced, and in any case all of the classes were too weak relative to the mobs for the first 4 years of the game. It was too easy to just get jumped, trained, and massacred in a level-appropriate zone. There simply weren't enough anti-frustration measures in place.
Anyhow, I don't think most people want to get rid of the trinity, just make it less holy, so the Ranger and the Shaman can be just as "needed" as everyone else. It's the same discussion in TESO; people want to be able to build a character to the theme they want and have that build work. not just a few cookie-cutters that stick completely to one point of the triangle. Every single build doesn't need to be equally good; in any game with character customization you'll have failbuilds. Failbuild, though, shouldn't be "failing to optimize as a onetrick pony".
Also, in regard to getting rid of the healer a la GW2 - If any role is a problem in the trinity, its the tank. Not because being able to take damage is a problem in itself, but because of what that implies. A real tank's role is not to take damage; it is to attack targets with its main gun. The game tank can't really do that though without infringing on the DPS.
But this brings up a problem! Why would a mob attack a character that really isn't a threat (does little damage) in favor of those that do a lot of damage? Human players won't; tanking doesn't work well in pvp, and in games like EVE, if you fight, say, a mixed battlecruiser fleet, the high-damage less resilient ships like Hurricanes will go down before the tougher-but-less-damaging Drakes.
Traditionally, this is answered with taunts. The warrior "taunts" or "generates threat" against an opponent. This is sort of a handwave approach where for some reason the mob, no matter how stupid (and unable to understand speech) it is, or how intelligent (and therefore immune to such tricks) it is, always wants to attack the warrior or paladin first because he called into question the circumstances of its birth. More advanced versions attach a little damage or a debuff to the taunt, but these tend to be trivial in the face of the fact that the mob is still getting fireballed and stabbed in the ***.
A better way needs to be found of making the monster want to attack the guy in the plate mail, who frequently is carrying the biggest sword anyhow, and really ought to be more of an actual threat and not just a "he needs to generate threat so everyone else doesn't get one-shotted" handwave threat.
Ironically, I think the best way to get rid of the tank is actually to keep the tank and get rid of DPS as a separate roll, bringing back the "support character" in his place, or at least just adding the support character back in and then saying "DPS is everyone's responsibility." DPS is what you do when you're not doing anything else. For some people that's almost all the time, for some its rare, and for others its in between. Every character, though, should have something meaningful they do other than deal damage.
That also has the side effect of killing, or at least reducing the impact of, the **** damage meter. If we could get rid of the damage meter, and along with it the "calculate your way to raid victory" thing, we'd be well on our way to new and innovative gaming.
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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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