That is an incorrect presumption, I did think pre-generated characters.
That is because the most prominent example given in the Kickstarter campaign was that of a young female sourcerer PC returning to her hometown after escaping Fort Joy. She was clearly a preset character because NPC's had pre-written dialogue making references to the PC and her history and relations with other NPC's.
I won't scour all the videos with Swen from back then, but I am pretty sure he said at least twice that once chargen were open to players, when you choose (!) to make your sourcerer heir male, it would somewhat affect the relationship with your little brother due to inheritance laws, i.e. him being unable to claim a supposed birthright as the eldest son to justify his betrayal.
And I am 100% certain that Swen said multiple times during the time of the KS campaign that while origins like that sourceress and the Red Prince would of course lock you into a race, they'd try to provide as many race choices as possible (and plausible) to origin stories where your race isn't crucial - all of them, not just the bland generic one.
I can live with all origins having gotten a fixed race in the end, as long as each race gets at least one story, but locked-in sex? Absolute no-go that could very well keep me from backing their next game. (Unless, again, every combination gets an option, in which - unlikely - case I'd only be slightly annoyed.) Only thing worse in that context would be if there were no customisation at all.
That a day/night-cycle didn't make it into D:OS (nor D:OS2), after all, was disappointing but understandable. However, in this case, not doing that fairly little bit of extra work would not be readily excusable to me; it's not like every dialogue choice has to concurrently reference every aspect every time, especially when it comes to sex/gender.
