We basically made a choice between offering many more or less superficial options, or to choose three that we can actually make interesting and meaningful. Your lifepath won't just decide how you start the game and what your background is, but it can also influence the rest of the game however you choose - but that does not mean that choosing a lifepath forces you into any way of playing the game.
Do you want to play a street kid who grew up in the city surrounded by gangs that then chooses to betray her heritage and work with the corpos? Go ahead, and the game will react to it.
So I hope this will be really exciting in terms of roleplaying. We're working hard to make it as cool as possible!
Lumping a lot of things together isn't itself a bad idea, it makes the choices carry a lot more weight by themselves, but in terms of how lifepaths are chosen in 2020 - to give those little
details to the character... I kinda hope you guys make the intros such, that you make some of those "superficial" choices within them even if the overall choice was based on those three general "big" options. Kinda like integrating the idea of multichoice lifepath within the intro scenes you've opted to go with.
It might sound like tiny bits no one cares about, to have such small influence things put in play, and that's certainly true if that's all there would be, but in conjunction with offering those big choices, giving the player good amount of influence over the nuances of his/her character, and have it affect at least something (even "superficial", as you put it), makes a big difference in the overall experience.
It's great fun to see these little things play out in unexpected ways, even if that didn't turn the world upside down on the spot. You know. Sometimes less is more is a saying I don't really tend to use, but when the context is right - like here, with the lesser choices for character past - it fits like a glove.
It's about character expression, and it underlines the freedom of gameplay and the players control over his character in ways that's not really achievable through those big choices that you already expect to work in a big way. It really is for the better of the experience.
Just something to consider.