Cory brings up several good points there. Rolemaster offers more flexible variety and the Gm has options to tweak as needed to meet his setting and groups needs. The Channeling Companion was meant (at least my understanding at the time) to help provide some guidance on how to customize the channeling realm and professions to meet those needs.
Don't know if you remember back when you were working on Channeling Companion, Cory, but you had I had a couple of discussions about such things as I was already doing this within my setting also. At that time you were the only other person I had heard about that was doing anything similar. Unfortunately I wasn't able to provide much useful info as what I did was simply modify the costs and base lists to fit what I pictured for each "profession" within each religion.
As an example, Cory mentioned the "Anti-Paladin", there was something similar (but yet not what most people would expect) to this that exists within my setting. They are called "Paladins of Death", however they are not evil like most people assume upon hearing the name, but rather within my setting, there are several different religions, each with their own sets of dieties (some are actually mono-theistic and believe that their god is the only one that exists, while there are others that include a large number of gods that all interact and have certain "sphere's of influence" if you will). However, when I was a senior in high school and was in the early stages of pulling together all these ideas for this setting, and was thinking about having multiple regions (as that was one of the things I hated about the D&D games that I had been in was each world had their own sets of deities and you had to choose one from that world, at least that was how the GM's that I knew at the time handled it), I was also working part-time for a funeral home and that got me thinking about death and many of the legends and concepts behind it, as well as the mythology behind undead. This in turn got me thinking that if there was an ultimate overseer of everyone once they passed away, that this being would not take kindly to spirits/souls of the dead being stolen away or prevented from making their way to whatever dimension/existence/whatever that he/she was overseer of. Thus the idea hit me that "Death" (a.k.a. "The Grim Reaper" (I was also a fan of Blue Oyster Cult and Led Zeppelin as well as other similar rock bands)) would likely have his own followers who dedicated their lives to destroying undead and sending restless spirits on their way to wherever it is they needed to go. And that these followers would need to have skills related to both combat and channeling, thus the idea behind the "Paladin's of Death" concept that I developed back in the mid 1980's for my setting.
Likewise there were dozens of other situations where priests of various deities within my setting should have base lists that differed from the standard Cleric base lists lists, and likewise I did something similar with the creation of other "Orders" of Paladins as well as variations on Rangers; again very similar to what Cory was talking about.
As frankly D&D just did not do a very good job with these things in my opinion (as well as in many other ways where it was too limiting or not flexible enough), thus the reason I made the change to Rolemaster back in the early 1980's, and never looked back.
Every purchase I've made of a D&D product in the last 28 or so years has been with a very grudgingly attitude, whereas every Rolemaster/Spacemaster purchase I've made has been accompanied by a level of excitement.
But in short it doesn't surprise me that D&D is trying to become more like RM, as RM has always (at least in my mind) been the pinnacle of RPG systems, or maybe a better way of saying it is that Iron Crown Enterprises had reached the Crowning Mastery point within the RPG industry when they developed Rolemaster.
