I know there are folks who will say that two sets on 100 surges is not a large enough sample size, and to a certain extent they're not wrong, but it was as much as I had the stamina for, and I felt it was telling that the noted patterns emerged in both sets, independent of one another.

I intentionally bit my tongue on that point, for exactly the reasons you gave

I did feel a lot like suddenly there was a sorcerer line for just about every situation, at leas tin the first part of the chapter, to the point that it made the occasional and infrequent race/calls options for races and for other classes - This is the new thing, and nothing else has even remotely as much as this has, and that feels kind of slap-dash, in a sense. I may not be communicating what I mean well, but it feels like an unprofessional development cycle... it's immediate flash at the cost of final quality, in a sense, because it's obvious that this was made later, and has so much more presence in the world than everything that came before it... maybe someone else can put it to words better, what I'm getting at.
That's an angle on it that hadn't occurred to me. Do you know/reckon if their telemetry includes dialog choices? Because that would be interesting information to your point. Are there a whole bunch of sorcerer dialog choices initially because it's flash and new, but then their selection drops off as the novelty wears off?