Thoughts On 5E Backgrounds

When I first read about Backgrounds I was kind of excited. Seemed a decent way to give a little bit of backstory with a couple of bits to give it some weight. So what went wrong?

1. When 5E shipped they didn't really provide much info on how to create your own Backstories and they provided enough that folks didn't bother. This was a missed opportunity as Backgrounds can help really define a campaign world. The DMs Guild created backgrounds but these were hidden from most people and the DMs Guild is lame.
2. Backgrounds were placed in the rules after race and class which is counter-intuitive as this is where the character came from, their upbringing before becoming an adventurer and should sensibly come between Race and Class.
3. Backgrounds were professions that applied to all races when they could have been used to help define the different races by having certain or even most background restricted by race. Sort of race as class but with Backgrounds. Elves are different than Dwarves and Backgrounds jobs would have been a nice way to show that.
4. The Personality Trait part was nonsense. Players should be determining their characters personality and not picking from a list or rolling. Also coming up with 8 interesting personality traits for every background was a lot to ask of the GM. Too much to ask when you consider to work properly you'd need a dozen or more Background.
5. The Ideal, Bond, & Flaw (my favorite part) were linked to professions. This part of the Background is asking a lot of the GM to create for each profession, but are ideal if associated with the different races. Create an Ideal, Bond, & Flaw for each race and you help define that race for your campaign world. This offloads the bulk of the work in creating the Jobs part of the Background and really opens things up.

I've written up a number of backgrounds while considering these points. Some I've taken from the Ba5ic game which is one of the few games to try to do something with Backgrounds. That game used Backgrounds to replicate the subclasses which is a nice difference from the way Wizards handled them. I'll post my backgrounds in the following days so folks can determine if my ideas work or if they are crazy nonsense. They are works in progress. These backgrounds are all customized for my Dwarven Vault campaign.