I know you've thought long and hard on this, Vincent.
The ordering of things is throwing me a little, though. We get the character intros right off the bat, then the character stuff again with the playbooks, then the brief (and different) character intros.
Repeating the character stuff three times feels weird. For what it's worth, I think it was working well when you jumped right into the basics (now page 11) instead of the character stuff up front.