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.)