I've had the opposite experience, and made hundreds of characters. Yes, I use a spreadsheet. To me, that's a feature, not a bug.
As far as the rank question, to me, it comes down to what credentials are presented to the bonding authority and potential employers. The CO may present themselves as a Captain, but if their credentials (i.e., Trait Points) only come up to a Lieutenant, then a Lieutenant's pay is the default. If you want more than that, you have to negotiate for it.
I am not sure what you are talking about?
Math is math, you can't have an opposite experience to me as number add up to what they add up to spreadsheet or not.
You may have missed the part about them being pre-optimization.
The point I was making is that the system without the optimizing leaves you with a lot of incomplete underpaid attributes/traits and to many overpaid skills.
You also wind up with way to many flavor skills (Interest/arts?) skills that are for the most part useless 99% of the time that you spend points on and can't get rid of.
To many prerequisites that are nowhere near their requirements at that point.
The system also tends to make age the most important factor for skill.
On the rank idea, you run into the same issues while you can give any justification for them, what if I go from the military to a civilian job?
My character decides to leave the military and become a professor or mechanic. What uses is the rank trait, it doesn't apply. I probably will never use it for any reason but I have still paid 100 x rank points for it. It's nice background info that I was once a (let say captain) but it's still points wasted.
This is another major issues with the way they decided to approach the Life Path system.
I most if not all the other system I have played the designers have either broken the attributes/traits/Skills into separate pools or the system just makes the character with a few points left over to customize.
4th is a point-buy system masquerading as a life path system.