Imperfect

If you're going to advocate for GURPS, you need to say, "Hi, my name is Angus, and GURPS once sucked."

1e and 2e are very similar and they aren't very good.

The promise of a better system is there, but it's not realized.

In 2e you could make, almost, anything you could imagine but didn't quite have the tools to convert a different imagining to GURPS.

This was, mostly, fine for me because I've made up everything from whole cloth a bunch of times.

But play was clunky.  There were obvious gaps where should be rules.  There were even a few places where there were rules when there should be gaps!

3e went a long way towards fixing things and realizing the promise of the original game.

But things started to... bloat... from there.

Every world book and supplement had additional rules.  Rules which were often contradicted by another world book or supplement.

It took major work to keep them sorted out.  Squabbles occurred when someone would prefer the solution from one supplement and someone else preferred a different solution.  Both being published and official rules for the game we were playing right this second.

3e (revised) plus the two Compendium books consolidated most of those extra rules and eliminated almost all of the contradictions.

Once characters were made, 3e and 3eR play very smoothly.

But there were still strange things.  If you wanted to fly like Superman, the last place you'd start is by buying "Flight".  You wanted to custom make a flight like power out of telekinesis.  It was a LOT cheaper.

The similar Hero system had something like this too.  There, if you wanted to move quickly clinging to the wall like Spiderman, you didn't buy clinging; you bought flight with the limitation, "must touch surface".

4e consolidated things again.  Some of the optional rules from the compendium became core rules but the real change was the advantages becoming effect driven rather than process driven.

Flying is now flight, regardless of HOW you fly with some modifications to account for how.  Flight is flight now.

Hi, my name is Angus and character creation in GURPS has always sucked.

It's not difficult.  It's cumbersome.

It's cumbersome because there are so many choices to make.

There are many choices because there's a lot of detail.

The good news is, once the choices are made, the actual play is simple.

The bad news is a player new to GURPS is going to be needing a lot of hand-holding to make a character that can do everything they're expecting their character to do.

Worse, a player new to the very idea of role playing won't even know what they're expecting of their character and will completely miss essential skills and advantages while crippling themselves with disadvantages.

4e's character templates help a great deal here, but there's still a lot of choosing to do.

Class based games, like D&D, shine at character creation because most of the choices are pre-made for the player and the class also informs the player what their role in the party will be.

Admitting this is the first step to recovery.