Thank you! This is some great thorough feedback and brilliant ideas, every "Story Item" having a con alongside it's pro would truly make a better game-design choice.
My problem with the existing story items system is that its a little too complex and unintuitive to less hardcore players (For example, civilization's tech tree has a more intuitive structure for new players)
I'll try to, there are some conflicting things, for example, more characters means less focus on each character, if there's a set amount of resources to spend, time-wisely, it's either spent spread among many characters, or towards the depth of each character, not sure which is the better option tho, will have to think about it.
Thanks again for the great comment, I enjoyed reading it!