[Suzerain of Sheol]

Case in point, in the character guide on GameFAQs for FE 10, easily over 60% of the cast is given a 5/10 rating or less. That's taking into account base stats, growths, and availability, among other things, but still, for a lot of those low scores, it's mostly just how god-awful their stats are. It's not like you can do anything to fix that in these games beyond wasting insanely precious stat boosting items, which would work much better on people who are already good.

Of note, though, most of the games seem to give you a high-level paladin early on who can be used to pull you out of tight situations. I prefer to unequip them and use them to draw since the AI gives priority to units who can't counterattack, and that way they don't steal XP from the rest of your characters who desperately need it.

Though, interestingly enough, Seth in FE8 is capable of soloing the entire game from the first chapter, but that's entirely the fault of how utterly incompetent the enemies in that game are. The fact that he has good bases and decent growths is just icing on the cake.

And FFT does have a similar problem, though at least there, if you bother to train the story characters, they're worth using. Rafa and Malak take a ton of effort but they can be really powerful, as can Reis. Agrias, Orlandeau and Meliadoul are kind of separate since they have those oh-so-useful 0-mp, multi-panel spammable swordskills and great equipment options. Still, even those three don't have anything else going for them in terms of initial abilities mastered. It's weird that someone as powerful as T. G. Cid wouldn't have leveled outside of his base job class at all. Not that he needs any other class to solo the rest of the game... :p