2. Discouraging people from playing humans. I'm sure I recall Sven saying it's disappointing for them to see so many people playing humans when they put so much effort into the other races.
This is an unfortunately common bit of misinformation that just won't seem to die. They thought it surprising and amusing, having spent all that time developing weird and wonderful races and appearance options for a fantasy setting, that when they tried to see what options people were picking the average was just a bloke that wouldn't have looked out of place walking down the street in any majority-white place here on Earth. I thought it was kind of funny too, but I bet they wish they'd never made that joke now! Which isn't to say that they wouldn't be keen for folk to experiment with everything the game has to offer, but it seems a huge leap to think they'd sabotage humans to push that.
EDIT: On variant humans I think we need to wait to see what Larian have actually done with humans, now it looks as though we're not getting non-variant-humans instead, but that every race will have a +2 and +1 flexible bonus to ability scores. You can't do variant human with that setup, as I think they just get +1 to two abilities, just as you can't do normal PHB humans either. It remains to be seen what we actually do have. From looking at the screenshots from PFH, the human seems to have polearm proficiency in addition to their +2/+1, but it's not clear whether that might be configurable.
