Someone's having an Outburst.
Seriously, though, my first reaction was: Custom dice, obvious marketing scheme, I'm never buying stupid dice for a single game, this is garbage, I'm not reading this, not playing this, it's bad and should feel bad, I'm buying every 4th ed book and pretending 5th ed never existed.
And then I actually gave the book a chance.
Those beta rules are good. This forum isn't terribly uncivilized either. I haven't seen the kind of fights referenced in OP's post. Sure, some people are mad it's not 4th ed, I get the feeling, I was like that for a few days before I sobered up. But it's not like everyone is trolling and being insufferable about who is right and who isn't. This is a beta, and there is civilized discussion about what works and what doesn't. And I wish OP would have come to us with a more detailed story of what didn't work in his attempts to run these rules, because well that's precisely the point of a beta, and it could have helped us all.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

Just because its different than you've done, doesn't mean its bad or restrictive.  The problem with the previous system was that there were so many disadvantages, and you got a direct point boost for taking them, so you were encouraged to throw your character under the bus - and more importantly - these typically got forgotten about afterword.  With 3-5 disadvantages per character you can't really make them all relevant to a story, especially when they only cost a few points...
With the new system they are always relevant - but can also be whatever you want them to be.  If you want your distinction to be more bland, go ahead.  I just assume a person is going to want something interesting about their character they are designing...
For narrative RPG (which FFG has turned L5R into) advantages and disadvantages are core to your character.  FATE chargen is basically writing 5 character points that are either advantages or disadvantages, and then you make up skills...  L5R does this much better.  Its important to understand these points are more central to your character than your air, earth, or void ring.

In all seriousness, though, this character generation isn't as free as you know and love L5R to be. And yes that means you can't literally decide your dude's life will be all about shougi and fishing for example at chargen if it doesn't fit what the system has in mind for your Clan and family and school. That is very true. There is little room for "I already know my concept and I am going to generate this specific character at 0xp" in this system, and this can be a weakness if that is what you are looking for in this game. Granted.
But on the other hand, it's also deeply thematic. You can literally let the questions guide you and you end up with a playable, interesting, both flawed and cool character, with some NPCs thrown in, a stance on Bushido and your Clan and your training. You can not accidentally build a murderhobo if you follow the 20 questions game and that's very very good in my opinion. And it can help new players get into the game a lot.
One way to look at this is to accept that at chargen you won't have done much with your life. You're not an expert shougi player and great fisherman. You just wish you could prove to the world your tactical brilliance through shougi and want to honor a fisherman ancestor by fishing more, and that's where your first few XP are going to go, and that's fine as well.
You're mad because you can't build the exact dude you thought of out of the box, but the rules as written allow for that dude to happen after litterally two game sessions, no matter how short are the sessions you play, and include those cool concepts you wanted at chargen into your progression, and maybe even in your curriculum.
What freedom you lose during chargen you more than make up for in swift evolution. And the lost freedom will be a massive boon to newbies who want to discover L5R with this edition. I believe it's a fair trade, but I can understand how that's a dealbreaker for you.

The worst I've seen and heard about L5R rpg community was probably a tendency of GMs trying to play "seppuku gotcha" with new players who had very little information about etiquette and other honor stuff, waiting for them to trip up on something un-obvious and then playing a "haha, this is a very dangerous NOT DND game, social rules are important, SHAME ON YOU, SEPPUKU TOMMOROW", like some kind of twisted hazing ritual.
Maybe it's a local thing. 

I've been reading the beta rules and there is one small thing that bugged me, and that's the seventh question of the game of 20 questions.
Either you firlmly believe in the precepts of your Clan and you get an Honor boost, which is fine by me, or you're a bit of a maverick among your own and you get one rank in a skill "opposed" to your Clan's thing.
And that's a bit wonky.
I get how the mountains and the sea are opposite, so I understand the rationale behind a not-very-dragony Dragon having a +1 in Seafaring, but it makes little to no actual sense no matter how I think about it. Same thing about Cranes and Commerce, given that Cranes can often be merchant patrons and the Crane is insanely rich because of that. Having unCrabby Crabs be good at design seems to spit in the face of the Kaiu and not-too-Unicorn Unicorns having a boost in Culture makes you wonder where the Ide fit.
Here is how I would fix this: If you do not fit in the stereotypical precepts of your Clan, you get a free rank in a Skill that is neither a family nor a school skill of yours. To represent how you got to learn things outside the box. Kind of a free skill rank, but sort of hard to cheese with other bonuses at chargen.
What do you think of this fix? Did this question bother you too?

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

Yes. I love this with the kind of giddy enthusiasm that would put my sensei to shame.

Which is fine.  But what are we creating here?  It seems to me that the game is intended as Movie Samurai mythology, not a Japanese middle-ages cultural simulator.  Just like D&D is Movie Fantasy mythology, not a European middle-ages simulator.

Hi, it's me, your friend who loves simple systems and cares veeery little about actual fights to replicate.
I can see how having the same TN to hit a master swordsman and a drowsy peasant is weird. I also appreciate how a simple +1 hop in TN is a big deal and +2 hops in TNs can seriously break the game (much like facing someone with very large Reflexes scores could screw things royally in 4th ed in terms of pacing a fight where nobody hits the other dude).
So hear me out, here is my fix:
At Rank 3, every bushi, monk and ninja gets their TN to hit bumped to 3.
At Rank 4 or 5 (haven't decided yet), every shugenja and courtier does too.
Voila.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

A character who doesn't care about Duty is going to be dead or Ronin. That's gonna be its own disadvantage.
   And, I'm sorry, but "a psychotic girl who has no specific ambitions or any kind of emotional sensitivity - she gets the job done, and can't be bothered by others' problems" is not an original concept.  It's a boring trope that I don't allow at my table for any game that I'm running.  I got my fill of that character as a teenager, faced with an endless horde of dual-wielding halfling rogue murderhobos.
   

Not all games support all character ideas equally well.  Old l5r was just making a person and letting them loose on the setting. You could care about the cultural ideals, you could cast them to the side, whatever. It didn't care. 
 
This version is very focused on getting your table playing like your game IS an old samurai film full of violence, drama, and personal choice. This isn't bad, necessarily, but it certainly is a more FOCUSED idea than the previous versions. Kind of reminds me of the game Dogs in the Vineyard. 

To be fair, complaining that "emotionless psycho" is hard to make in  game about samurai torn by duty and human emotion is kind of like complaining that a game about support heroes doesn't support mundane serial killers in chargen :P. 
I would suggest going for a high Void for your character, as Void rolls ignore Strife results and are generally detached, so you will ignore the Strife part of the game.

To be honest, if you only rolled once, I would hate this part of chargen with the force of a thousand suns. But you don't. You roll twice and pick one. And this changes everything.
Sure, you may have a specific concept in mind and want to have control over this, but I believe this isn't about you. I believe this is about the newcomer who may have a bit of a hard time exactly figuring out how their character fits into family and personal longings and obligations and ranking up and glory and honor and blahblahblah. Sure, it may seem contrived, and I assume it's fairly simple to let a player choose, it's not that big of a twist in the rules. But for people who are new at this and need to find hooks to feel their character as being part of a complex society that sometimes has weird consequences in your life for stuff you never asked for, this part of randomness is really good. Because since you get to choose between your two rolls, you never really get stuck with the one ancestry that ruins your character forever. A worst case scenario is one ancestry that you don't want and another that may not exactly fit your concept, but still makes sense in the context of fiction. And that's good. Having character profiles not be entirely monolithic is good. And the bonuses are fairly low too, so a character who gets helped by their ancestry isn't like miles ahead of everyone else and laughing in the distance. It's flavor, it can bring in things you hadn't initially thought about (which is often the strength of randomness in chargen), and it isn't meant to screw you over with a terrible ancestry that is necessarily opposed to everything else on your sheet.

I've been reading the beta rules and there is one small thing that bugged me, and that's the seventh question of the game of 20 questions.
Either you firlmly believe in the precepts of your Clan and you get an Honor boost, which is fine by me, or you're a bit of a maverick among your own and you get one rank in a skill "opposed" to your Clan's thing.
And that's a bit wonky.
I get how the mountains and the sea are opposite, so I understand the rationale behind a not-very-dragony Dragon having a +1 in Seafaring, but it makes little to no actual sense no matter how I think about it. Same thing about Cranes and Commerce, given that Cranes can often be merchant patrons and the Crane is insanely rich because of that. Having unCrabby Crabs be good at design seems to spit in the face of the Kaiu and not-too-Unicorn Unicorns having a boost in Culture makes you wonder where the Ide fit.
Here is how I would fix this: If you do not fit in the stereotypical precepts of your Clan, you get a free rank in a Skill that is neither a family nor a school skill of yours. To represent how you got to learn things outside the box. Kind of a free skill rank, but sort of hard to cheese with other bonuses at chargen.
What do you think of this fix? Did this question bother you too?

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

TN to hit Toturi might be still 2, but your puny Rank 1 Samurai will hit him for what, 5 damage? Versus Toturis double digits pool of Wounds. Sack of Potates on the other hand will sport mighty 4 Wounds. 
Defence scales in the way that the stronger you are, the harder you get to Injure, and you become increasingly better at making Critical Injuries whiff. The biggest issue here is Wounds being called Wounds instead of something else, because while you fill opponents with Wounds, you are not actually Injuring them - you are tiring them out, probing their defences, slowly outmanuevering them and getting your attempts at making their heads roll blunted by their own defensive measures.
Capability of sustaining Wounds *is* the active defense that scales in this game. 
The mechanic seems to be balanced about creating a tempo where characters need at least two hits from a SIMILARLY POWERFUL OPPONENT to go down. The better you get, the more damage you can output; the stronger they get, the more damage you NEED to output. 

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

It's also widely accepted nowadays in rpg theory (or maybe I am just an insufferable reader of indie games who enjoys sniffing his own farts) that the quality of a game lies in how much the system makes it easy and straightforward to replicate the intentions stated by its writers.
For example, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is a game that says it's about death and second chances and making your peace with what will pass and keeping hope and talking with ghosts to resolve their unfinished emotional business. And provides only rules for fights and being buddies with other guys like you.
Geist: the Sin-Eaters is terrible.
Now if you want to play samurai drama, FFG makes it very clear that that's what they're going for. They repeat it time and again. And maybe you don't like that, and that's fine, you don't need to play this game and previous editions are still there if you need them. They're good too, in their own way!
But it's a bit rich to blame them for trying to write a system that does everything in its power to keep its thematic promise.

Someone's having an Outburst.
Seriously, though, my first reaction was: Custom dice, obvious marketing scheme, I'm never buying stupid dice for a single game, this is garbage, I'm not reading this, not playing this, it's bad and should feel bad, I'm buying every 4th ed book and pretending 5th ed never existed.
And then I actually gave the book a chance.
Those beta rules are good. This forum isn't terribly uncivilized either. I haven't seen the kind of fights referenced in OP's post. Sure, some people are mad it's not 4th ed, I get the feeling, I was like that for a few days before I sobered up. But it's not like everyone is trolling and being insufferable about who is right and who isn't. This is a beta, and there is civilized discussion about what works and what doesn't. And I wish OP would have come to us with a more detailed story of what didn't work in his attempts to run these rules, because well that's precisely the point of a beta, and it could have helped us all.

I've been reading the beta rules and there is one small thing that bugged me, and that's the seventh question of the game of 20 questions.
Either you firlmly believe in the precepts of your Clan and you get an Honor boost, which is fine by me, or you're a bit of a maverick among your own and you get one rank in a skill "opposed" to your Clan's thing.
And that's a bit wonky.
I get how the mountains and the sea are opposite, so I understand the rationale behind a not-very-dragony Dragon having a +1 in Seafaring, but it makes little to no actual sense no matter how I think about it. Same thing about Cranes and Commerce, given that Cranes can often be merchant patrons and the Crane is insanely rich because of that. Having unCrabby Crabs be good at design seems to spit in the face of the Kaiu and not-too-Unicorn Unicorns having a boost in Culture makes you wonder where the Ide fit.
Here is how I would fix this: If you do not fit in the stereotypical precepts of your Clan, you get a free rank in a Skill that is neither a family nor a school skill of yours. To represent how you got to learn things outside the box. Kind of a free skill rank, but sort of hard to cheese with other bonuses at chargen.
What do you think of this fix? Did this question bother you too?