This is useful and interesting information for the Phoenix Project, I think. Can you please go into what your next steps were? Particularly anything that didn't require actually picking a fight with something or getting a mission to perform.
We will take these into consideration as we plan our the precise development order of things with the character builder for the Phoenix Project, and how it develops going forward towards the base builder.
Next would be, as someone else mentioned, setting up the UI: three bars, attack powers on bar 1, defense and other toggles on bar 2, travel powers and other miscellaneous powers - like Secondary Mutation and Mystic Fortune - on bar 3. (I'd eventually add a fourth bar when the powers started to really pile up in the 40s)
And after that was actually playing the character - seeing how the character performed immediately, and trying to identify any holes that hadn't been immediately obvious from looking at the powers in the creator, to fill them in with future power picks, power polls, and eventually even Epic and Incarnate powers.
... I do like the idea of a Powerhouse-like structure for training, where you can try out powers before you pick them permanently. One of CoH's little frustrations was always having to completely re-pick all your powers and reslot all your enhancements when all you wanted to do was fix the last one. (CO handles respeccing much more simply and elegantly, being able to remove powers one-by-one working backwards as well as all at once, all for normal in-game money rather than special respec tokens)
Can you think of any other features that would be useful in a character creator?
Real numbers with an adjustable level bar like CoH had is a must for me. I want to see exactly what all the powers do, numerically, before I settle on a powerset (especially if I'm locked into those Primary and Secondary powersets once I leave the creator).
... really, though, just start with the features from CoH's character creator as a baseline. I don't think there was anything there that was worthless. (Well, maybe the "playstyle" screen can be skipped)