From digging about on the internet I pulled together a number of data sets on preferred race and class combindations of PCs over the past ~4 years (2017-2020). I wanted to see if there was a change over time but instead I found a distinct difference depending on where the data was sourced from.
First - setting everything up according to date does not show much in the way of a distinct pattern.
However once this is sorted by source type we see a difference between the relatively smooth curve of the online tools and apps (orange) and the forum survey responses.
Initial hypothesis is that there is a large block of players who just want to sit down and play that tend towards melee types - "give me my sword and board and lets roll dice!" - compared to those who answer forum surveys that show more interest in spell casters both divine and arcane.
Aggregating these into a pair of archetype finger prints weighted by the number of contributors to each source highlights this difference. A single forum response deviated significantly from the forum archetype: a survey on RPG.net in 2017 requesting only those characters that responders had played for at least 1 session.
Data sources include 2 sets of raw data (OGANM app, Reddit Subclasses 2019) and 1 estimate based on sub-forum pageviews (RPGBOT) - the others are processed outputs from the creators of those sources (e.g. the report-out by a survey creator, DnDBeyond Dev webcast, etc.)
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