It's interesting that you point out backgrounds, because that's actually the backgrounds playing as intended. It promotes players building a very obvious strength and weakness. In an earlier draft of the game I didn't have a background system, and some folks I had make characters for testing were very frustrated with the way that the game didn't have a "balanced" character option, since they didn't have enough points to balance out their weaknesses. I reduced the total number of points available to the players and added the background system to promote both character building and more polarised builds. The players feel like they got one over the game by getting a "free point," and at the same time are guided into playing more interesting characters
As for the capitalising errors. Ah, eto... Bleh?
Oh, I definitely like the backgrounds! They're a cool bit of color and they add context to a character's stat block.
The game explicitly wanting players to have at least one attribute with a 1 in it to absorb the penalty from the background feels strange, though. Or at least the way it's presented feels strange to me, since my instinct is still to try and build a balanced character, and this mechanically punishes that.
I *do* like the idea of intentionally building in an exploit to funnel player behavior, but I think I would have an easier time if the game simply required a 1 in your background's dumpstat.
(Please do not take any of this to say that you should go back and tinker with core rules in a finished game, that way lies a path of nightmares. More that I as a reader wasn't always on the game's wavelength, which is normal for any published game.)
Oh, certainly, and there is 0 chance that I revise this game again. I've already gone through all of that process. I didn't want to mandate a 1 in a player's stat block, as that just takes away their agency. This way, they still get to make the choice regarding if they want a 1 in their stat block at all (or a 0, in the case of Fortune).