These two (consecutive) posts are of special interest to 'Bastards"Start with the Character you want" philosophy:
One drawback of "complex chargen, simple play" is that you're putting the hardest, most impactful decisions up-front when the players have the least information to make them. At character creation, you don't really know how effective melee weapons vs ranged weapons vs persuasion will be, or how much time you'll spend in the wilderness vs dungeons vs cities. You can make educated guesses and the GM can tell you their plans and adapt to your choices, but it still might not work out.
One way to mitigate this is to postpone the complexity to higher levels. A first-level D&D character is much simpler than a tenth-level character, and by then the player will have a better idea of what character stats and abilities will give them the kind of play they want.
Another way is to make the advancement mechanics very flexible. If your starting choices don't lock you in and you have many opportunities to change your character focus, then a new player can pick whatever sounds interesting and adjust as they play.
In other words, chargen confronts the player with hard choices, and Players can find that they have made bad choices after the first playsession.That is a really good point. I can't tell you how many games I've played in where I've completely rebuilt my character after the first session. In fact, the "first session full respec" is something that we just practice as a rule in my group. I also really like it when systems include some sort of limited respec at every level- allowing you to move a few skill points around and such. It feel natural and is more forgiving for the player.
I think this is the purest intent behind most leveling systems, particularly why early levels go quickly and later levels take so long to get. If you start very bare-bones, you can quickly gain skills and track them, before levelling off- but the higher levels also introduce more complicated abilities with deeper interactions.
Starting weak and quickly gaining power, as seen in d20 style systems, allows players to quickly incorporate priorities mapped out in play.
Bastards greatly alleviates the problem by limiting the skill list, if the released Character Sheet is anything to go by.
Nevertheless, this is something i haven't previously thought about, so there you go.