Class Building Blocks: Lego or Duplo?

Seeing 41 different options on my current character class list is a lot less impressive than it should be. First off, a character without any special starting abilities, like being an awakened psion or of a particular bloodline, only has access to 35 of those options. Further, a lot of the things listed on the "Class" list are more like Class fragments. Magic has been broken up into its various Schools, and each School is taken individually. Some of the iconic abilities of various classes have been stripped away from the class, and divided up into smaller packages.

For instance, the Paladin abilities such as Detect Evil and Lay on Hands are now distributed amongst Crusader, Temple Knight, and Faith Healer. These "fragments" have a lower experience cost if taken alone, obviously, but the idea is that you can build your own adventurer. One of the fragments is simply an extra starting combat proficiency, which could be anything from another weapon proficiency to metamagic. Some of the fragments are levelable, improvable crafting "classes" such as Bowyer, Armorer, and Alchemist.

And, one is simply a "Citizen" class: no abilities, no special stuff, you get the benefits inherent to your ability scores. That was mostly just to give me something I can use for NPCs, but it could be fun to start a group off as Citizens and have them progress to other classes and abilities through training.

The image I have in my head of how all this should work seems good: a mix between a class-based and a skill-based game with enough variance and limiters that not every character is going to be able to do everything, but will have more varied abilities than a typical character in a class-based system.

I still need to finish separating the magic into schools, to make it easier to roll them, and I still need to determine a setting, at least a small area to start in. Then comes the fun part.