Step 1: think of a character concept
Step 2: put it into whatever class and species you want
Step 3: whenever you level up pick whatever is thematically closest to the concept
Congrats! You've made a competitive PF2 character!
Okay. I will make a charismatic barbarian and since you haven't specified where to put my stats, Con and Cha will be their highest stats. After all I need HP and I want to still be able to talk to people. I am sure having just 12 strength is fine, it's above average, right? Let's make them an Elf too, that seems good. And let's make my initial feats about convincing people and stuff!
Overly simplified break there maybe but if you think PF2E makes it easy to create a character, you are so wrong I can't even. Look at a game like Fabula Ultima to actually have good character creation where the concept I just described would actually be viable and not a joke.
Gods thank you. TTRPGs, in my opinion, are about creating a story, not playing a miniature game where the point is to win. Besides, even if you manage to create a nonviable character in PF2e somehow, a good GM will properly adjust everything to party ability anyways.
I am really curious if you are just unable to see the complexity of the game because you know it, or if you genuinely think character building in PF2E is easy. I have been in PF2E games and even with the assistance of foundry, it was a struggle to keep track of everything for low level characters. To just enumerate the pitfalls that my group ran into in the more recent game:
Our bard had a str of 8 and a whip, because whips are cool. She tried to fight with it a few times and it did about as much as you'd expect.
Our Paladin took a cantrip that made a tree trunk appear and fall on enemies (I forgot the exact name of it). That spell never did anything at all, as every single enemy resisted it easily and every action spent on that spell was a complete waste.
Our wizard had a really low con and would go down like a bowling pin whenever anything hit them. There was a story reason why the con was that low too, so they made a cool character and it really didn't work out for them too well in combat.
Only one person (me) understood what weapon runes were and bought one before we set out on a big adventure. I did tell the other players what these runes do, but they didn't want to spend the money on those runes at the time. I then had to carry the team because I was the only one doing appreciable damage for most of that adventure.
We also had a level appropriate fight at some point, against a pair of earth creatures (think big armadillos, I forget their name it's been like a year at this point). They had such huge AC and saves that we were unable to do damage to them, while they nearly turned the whole front line to stone. The only reason we didn't all die was that the DM realized the problem and allowed us to flee, in spite of being reduced to taking less actions per turn because of the partial stoning. I verified later that the encounter was indeed level appropriate according to PF2E, so I can only assume that all of us built our characters wrong in ways I don't even know myself.
So like, what is it? Can you not make a bad character, or is it in fact very easy? I think it's the latter and people who stick with PF2E just don't realize the amount of game knowledge they gain over time. Because you can make the coolest character concepts ever and you can totally realize them in the system, but once combat starts, unless your decisions were at least semi-optimal, you will feel useless. And sure you can say the DM should adjust things, but what if your DM is also new to the system, like ours was? Then you expect them to just intuit that a given encounter is too much? How? I won't dive into the depths of PF2E after 8 hours on my day job.
So yea, thanks to the people who write guides for this, because I can at least read someone's opinion on the options I have in front of me and understand why some are better then others. And well...it's really not hard to make a cool concept in spite of taking good options.
No. I get that PF2e is complex. Way moreso than 5e. However, as the GM of the group, I always always tell people to come up with an idea for a character with a background and then build around that. If it's ineffective, then who cares. I'll adjust the difficulty of the encounters around that. But I'm not going to allow metagamed superbuilds at my table because it's quite clear that that person is not interested in the type of game I'm trying to run.