This is a raw idea that popped into my head listening to a podcast with a group that switches systems often. Almost every TTRPG makes character creation one of the first if not the first item in the book after the "what is role playing" section.

B/X D&D: two pages of intro and we're off to character creation
AD&D: A page of introduction and then to character creation
3.x D&D: An overview Character creation is the first thing after the TOC, beating out even the standard introduction by a page, and then continuing not 2 pages later
4e D&D: 8 pages of introduction, then character creation
5e Basic: 3 pages of introduction, then CC
Delta Green: you get a basic overview of the game premise and then right on to character creation
Fate: 30 pages of general "making a fate game" before character creation, but a vast majority of how to play the game comes after
Red Markets: 30 pages of intro and an explanation of the core mechanic and onto CC
Dungeon World: A basic "playing the game" section before you get to character creation, I could almost give this a pass because pretty much everything after that is GM stuff, but it's still fairly early in the book
Mg Traveller: Page 5
Classic Traveller: Page 15
D6 systems: Page 6

And so on and so forth.

There are in my collection two notable exceptions. Eclipse Phase actually has 127 pages of story, setting and general game mechanics before getting to the actual character creation, although there's another 200 pages of additional rules after the character creation. And the one that sort of triggered this idea in my head while listening: Basic D&D (red box) gives you a full on solo adventure before you hit character creation (although even this has CC before most of the rules).

So I got to thinking, because like most GMs I know, I want to play and run more systems than my players do, and the times I have been most successful with getting my players to try a new system or even switch systems has been when we've skipped character creation entirely, and I've handed them pre-made characters. And I think this makes sense. Learning a new system is a lot of work. There's a lot of things you have to keep track of and understand (especially in modern systems) how everything interacts. Trying to learn to create a character first, understanding what skills or attributes are really important, understanding whether taking this or that advantage or disadvantage is worth the cost, all of that is just additional load to take on for something you're not even sure you're going to like. And the sort of character you create is honestly dependent on the game itself. If a player tells me they want to be an "Investigator" well that builds very different characters in Call of Cthulhu than it does in Delta Green than it does in GUMSHOE, but until they've played the game, they won't know that. And I think that's part of why D&D Basic (red box) really did well for folks. It basically dropped you into a game with a pre-gren before introducing you to character creation. And lets face it, the person most likely to read the rulebook is the GM.

So why do we keep putting character creation at the beginning of the book? Tradition obviously, but I think it's also because of how we think of starting a game. You need to have characters to play a game, but if "the order in which you need things" was the true driver of book order, then the skills and equipment chapters would come even before character creation, and yet they don't. And we frontload these systems with their character creation subsystems, which leads GMs and Players alike to think they need to do this first.

But maybe we shouldn't. Maybe the first pages should be pre-gen characters, and then the general system play stuff (you know, the Combat / Adventuring sections for D&D, the space faring (and combat) sections for Traveller etc). Heck maybe all the GM stuff should come first too, and character creation should be an appendix at the end. You don't NEED character creation rules to play the game, you need characters, and that makes a difference. Both to the players, who can pick up and go and worry about learning and playing the game itself and not the character creation mini game. But it also helps the GM. All too often when reading through the rules I have to go through the character creation process so that I can have a character to reference as I read the rest of the rules. Play examples are nice, but sometimes they need to highlight something specific, or they want to sell something awesome (I'm looking at you Captain Jamison from Traveller), and I need to see what the likely outcomes are with a normal character.