Re: Savage Worlds
I'm just learning SW (I've had it since it first came out, but the couple of games we played were lacking and the published material at the time while not bad reads, didn't fit what I wanted in a game), so in addition to getting into a couple of games here, I watched the YouTube "Let's Play/Live Play" samples. Granted, the majority were entertaining, they didn't leave me with the impression that SW would work well for the type of game I wanted to see for a long-term campaign.
After seeing the Savaged Pathfinder hack and finding the Shaintar setting, I'm seeing options I hadn't fully considered before (well, that and somebody gave racial variants I liked without me having to try to edit those presented in the core book and create back histories for the race in question... :) )
I'm more into telling individual stories and fleshing the setting out as I go than I am with creating a full-fledged campaign world. Usually my worlds change to fit the story I have in mind for this season and the players I have. Which is also how I made characters: vague concept, a couple of specific impressions, then flesh it out through play and world interaction.
This isn't a style that's well-geared to SW, and I think contributes to "every character's the same" impression because mechanically that tends to be the case, especially for starting novices. Given that I don’t usually like keeping a d4 in any attribute, most of my characters have identical stat blocks.
But, having played various d20 games before they were d20, (the entire d20 system is extra "fluff" around the core system Bard Games used for Talislanta and The Atlantis Trilogy (although The Arcanum added a lot of the same "fluff") - the lead designers also created the re-release of Talislanta when WoTC first published an RPG, so they owned the framework license). The stat itself wasn't important, the modifier was and on average the majority of chaeacters had the same modifier spread. Those modifiers enhanced related skill checks.
That realization makes SW not seem so 'restrictive'/'restricted', but didn't help much with the new character conceptualization issue. That's why I liked class-/archetype- based games as they triggered the 'what if' part of my character creation process. Once I've seen multiple examples (in the genre/setting) of how to mechanically pull of the concepts, then I get better at knowing what I need to have as a minimun to achieve what I envision for the character.