Draw Steel is going to be significantly more approachable with a Virtual Toolset for making characters.
I want to start by saying that I appreciate the packet is in a rough/loosely edited state, I'm not criticising that at this point, and everything points to MCDM making it well edited and approachable in the future, so I'm not worried.
But here's my actual point:
I made a character and it took me, what, an hour and a half without a character sheet? Putting it all together myself it felt like a chaotic mess that I wouldn't want to drag a player at my table through. It was interesting, but it took forever and I was really worried about adding complexity to the Casters by replacing kits with multiple other choices, that adding complexity at level 1 was moving in the wrong direction.
Then, I saved that character, made a copy, scrubbed the character from it and kept the admittedly still very loose formatting I'd had to put together for copying and pasting bits in. And I made a character for each of the other classes. In the next hour and a half.
It took me 8 times as long to put the character sheet together as I went, as it did to make a character after the fact. And it was REALLY FUN, and the choices were MEANINGFUL! I'd take anyone through that because it was a delight.
Wards and Focuses/Prayers were very quick decisions that didn't complicate anything particularly. I was worried initially, but when you make a High Elf Talent that's good at Disengaging, you just take the Focus of Speed without much thought and carry on. It's a little way to turn up the volume more than a core decision. Want a Ward that fits your character? Well, generally that's pretty obvious too. It's not as ground breaking as a Kit, but I don't think a Caster is defined by their gear like a Martial combatant is. I say the magic is purple, and there goes 90% of the animation budget.
So basically my point is this:
It's not as overwhelming as it looks. Culture is basically "pick three skills" and massively fleshes out your character before you've noticed.
I know Matt has said it before in videos, but presentation really does matter, and because I know they know that, I think people will find it a lot easier to fall in love with this at release/with a VTT.
Ultimately, a VTT is going to be dynamite for this kind of game. Turning walls of text to parse into a series of drop-downs is going to make this so, so fast to make a meaningful and interesting character. Goodbye "Ctrl C, Ctrl V, uh-oh the formatting is bugged out again."
I don't think you can make a boring character at all, actually.