Uncounted 4th pillar of game play - character building

tl:dr; character creation is the missing 4 pillar of gameplay, second favorite after roleplay.

A twitter poll by VanishXZone asking "What is your favorite part about DnD 5e?" included character creation alongside the 3 pillars of gameplay described in the D&D books - Exploration, Roleplaying and Combat. The results give a nice quantification of how important character creation is - second most important aspect of the game after roleplaying.

To check if this was anomalous I scrubbed out the character creation results and rescaled the rest to 100%. Comparing this against multiple other polls on the 3 pillars we can see it fits very well to the preference for the 3 pillars seen in many polls and research surveys.

To me it says that in asking about the 3 pillars we are missing the "just building characters" aspect of the game and this poll suggests it is the 2nd most preferred aspect. Putting the character building data back in, scaled to the '100% is 3-pillars' we get a sense of how important this aspect of the game could be.

It gives some actual numbers for how important all the character builder apps are to people. Intuitively this makes sense with what I have witnessed, with players creating characters for the fun of seeing the build and abandoning them before ever rolling dice in anger. The memes floating about the internet about procrastinating by building characters on D&D Beyond also fit this.

I also like this from a numbers perspective because with this pillar included we see a much more natural drop-off of population preferences. The very spikey 3 pillars graphs now look more reasonable when this missing pillar is blocked in.

I do not think this is going to be a shocking revelation for anyone that character building is an enjoyable aspect of the game but it does give a nice sense of how important it is compared to other elements. Perhaps some of the vitriol in discussions about people bringing sub-optimised builds to the gaming table could be tied to this? Those who build for an interesting character and those who build for combat effectiveness both understanding they are engaging with an important aspect of the game but mis-understanding the weighting the other is placing as they build their characters?

Other sources are:
Tabletop RPG Research Survey 2020 - 2021 Results Update #1
Sven Writes twitter poll (2020)
Sly Flourish facebook poll (2018)
D&D reddit survey (2014)