If you are starting from scratch (new house), and you plan ahead, you can do just about anything. It's being constrained to existing house, and or market/regional design-taste that can make things hard and expensive.
I just got a new roof, planned for years during the remodel to do a standing seam metal roof. It's pretty much the best option for a pitched roof, and since my house is a hip roof, they look great. Problem is the hip design, with a kitchen and porch adding secondary projections, and a chimney cricket all added up to there being lots of angles, 2 big valleys, which sends the price way up. In general standing seam might be said to be 25-50% more than high end shingle roof, mine was going to be over 3x, and that was with all the sheeting, ice&water over entire roof and so forth factors in for both, it was just the covering. At the same time if my house was just a simple rectangle with a gable roof, a standing seam could have been cheap, and even cheaper possibly than shingles. The shape and complexity are a very big driver. Also if I had done metal, the irregularities of my house would have caused nightmares. In the end I had to do singles, even though I hate them and would like to see them banned from building code (fire hazard, short life, fill up landfills, etc, etc). Until they ban them in code, they will stay the cheap common option as people and culture won't change to other options.
Tile, Slate, and such are also good, but have the same challenges as metal (cost, un-common, hard to find contractors).
But if your designing from scratch, you can design the roof to make the roof materials practical. Think outside of just a peak, you could do a single large shed roof, that keeps the design simple which makes the install cost on better materials much cheaper. Also not doing things like dormers will reduce cost all around. Getting vent pipes to all one single vent pipe will also help. I did this because the house was planned for metal, so the only thing that goes thru my roof now is a single vent pipe, made the roofers happy, but since I ended up with shingles it didn't matter as much.
Me, if I was building from scratch, the whole house would be concrete, so the house would have a flat roof make with pre-cast core slabs of concrete, with a top layer of concrete, and then a green roof (plants) put on top of that. Good to go for a few centuries. Outside of flat/concrete roof structure, I'd go standing seam pitched south at the correct pitch for solar. Maximize for that, the roof will last forever and installation of solar arrays is much easier/cheaper on standing seam as your house now has a built in roof rack for them.
Just don't make roofs with tons of features and 1000 sq ft of surface all pooring down into a single gutter 2 feet long and the center of the house like so many houses done today, just going to be a problem. You can't win in a fight against water, so focus on water management on a roof to prevent the house from having perpetual problems.