You can do this. Play a rogue, give them a bow. Congrats, you have a ranged rogue who can sneak attack with a bow! You want to have a smoothtalking rogue with a rapier? Go for it, nothing in the class description says you can't. In fact, if you use just a rapier and no shield, you'll get a nice accuracy bonus, which translates to more crits, which translates to a great swashbuckler. Its almost like everything you're asking for you can do with the rogue, and you're mad because someone else can put their rogue in heavier armor and have them be in the front lines. You're also still stuck on the idea that rogues are skillmonkeys, which I'm glad they're not. But you want your rogue to sneak? Lucky for you, they start with points in sneak. Want them to lay traps? Lucky for you, they start with points in mechanics. But maybe you want to play a dirty fighter. Now you can. Fighters are mob-crushers, yes. Fortunately, there is still a class for those people who want to lay down the hurt on one person in a straight-up brawl: the rogue. (It can just do a lot of other things too, if you want it to).
3E rangers had d10 HD. It wasn't until 3.5 that they got dropped to d8. Also, in 3.0, they were utterly boring classes that had few skills, got free (but fewer) feats than a fighter of equivalent level, and eventually got utterly worthless druid spells. You could build a better "ranger" by multiclassing fighter/druid with a few rogue levels. All you missed out on were favored enemies, which was a spectacularly boring ability anyhow. 3.0 rangers were awful. 3.5 rangers, on the other hand, had the animal companions, a bunch of skills, some outdoor related feats, and some...rather boring druid spells. They felt like a unique class, like the paladin, rather than "fighter that gets druid spells I guess" that they were in 3.0. Anything that makes rangers different from their 3.0 incarnation is good in my book.