1. You can't make characters on servers with high populations. If your friend plays on a high-pop server you're fucked. If the server population is high enough you are stuck waiting for... maybe days. There's no way of knowing when you can make your character aside from a page that takes a snapshot once every 5 hours. Sometimes the windows of opportunity are very small, forcing you to "camp" character select waiting to be able to play the game.

2. There's no way to try a class without either watching the entire 10 minute cutscene, deleting a character, and starting over... except leveling to 15 and doing all of the story quests on the way first. And 2a.) You can't skip the first cut scene, even if you've seen it already? Seriously?