Since level three is when you can pick your archetypes does that mean levels 1-2 are pointless for starting a game? I mean most of the time when I DM most people know what they want right before the game. Has this always made you scratch your head?
First of all, I don't think the
archetype is necessarily the most important thing for all players.
In some games, everyone's archetype is strongly rooted into the fantasy world, if the DM has decided to treat archetypes as
organizations of characters, so that for example "Druids of the Circle of the Moon" are actually a different network of people compared to "Druids of the Circle of the Land (Desert)" and so on.
But there are also plenty of games where even the base class is not rooted into the fantasy world, and being a Wizard or a Cleric doesn't mean to part of a whole group but merely owning a set of skills, and instead most groups are cross-class. You have the church of Thor with its own Clerics, Paladins and why not Fighters and some Wizards, and then the church of Loki with people who could be of those classes too without any relationship to those of the other group.
My guess is that in
most gaming groups, every player has its own opinion on what mostly
defines their PC, and some might not even care much about their archetype. Different classes suggest difference importance of their archetypes... for instance, for a Ranger being a Hunter vs a Beastmaster or for a Fighter being a Champion or a Battlemaster is more a matter of
tools they can use, while even Druids
sub-archetypes (Circle of the Land) have stronger implications on how (or where!) the character lives.
But it is true, that the choice of archetype is a major choice which affects the future levels of the PC, certainly a bigger "choice point" than feats, spells or variable class features. Still, I don't think this makes the first 2 levels unimportant.
That said, in 3rd edition we did pretty much end up starting all games at 3rd level after a couple of years... I think the reason was that in such edition there were stronger incentives towards character builds based on
combos, and at least for us
feats were a major part of that. So one feat (at 1st level) quickly felt too little to give your PC enough identity to start with, unless you were a human (or Fighter), while 3rd level already gave you at least 2 feats to combine together.
Maybe I haven't played 5th edition enough, but so far I never got that feeling, that my PC was still too little defined at 1st level. I am also generally not looking forward to future levels
nearly as much as I used to be in 3rd edition, once again because I don't feel like character building is as important as before.
Survivability is a separate matter altogether. While it is less easy to die in 5e than previous editions, it's understandable that many players are still scared of that at low levels, because they just see their low HP. Level 3 already more than doubles your HP (and symmetrically, your negative HP threshold to avoid instant death from massive damage, which is IMHO the
real deal). I am not 100% sure however whether this is only a matter of perception... with some statistical calculations, it should be possible to check if
really low level PCs have a higher chance of death, or if instead the scaling monster damage offsets the increasing HP.