I personally feel that a lot of this thread has been focusing on the wrong area. Someone above posted (I think Moriarty) that if you remove races or professions, that is only reducing choice and detail, not making the game any easier. From my experience new players *like* choice and detail, but where the headache comes in is figuring out the math. When I advise players to come to the game with a calculator, I'm not kidding.
The trend with new games these days is for very rules light systems (e.g. 2 stats - physical, and mental; a handful of generic skills or spells; etc) so presenting hefty mechanics first day off is probably not going to win you many favours. I would:
1) Keep races and professions, talents and so on - players like all of that and it isn't very rules heavy
2) ditch temporary & potential stats, but keep some mechanism to allow them to increase at level up time
3) Slim down the skills list, including weapons. MERP worked very well at the level of having a 1H slashing skill, for example. The skills is where having a choice becomes intimidating, you don't need an enormous skills list to have a functional character.
4) Do something to the point buy skills scheme. I don't know how many times I have to explain that to new players, but you could keep choice and variety by having skills groups (e.g. combat, social, magical etc) and have each profession have a skill cost that applies to all skills in that category, so fighters would have 1 in combat skills, rogues might have 3, wizards would have 5, and so on. Spend double that amount for a second rank or something.
5) Simplify the mechanics for calculating skill totals. It is enough to have a skill bonus, stat bonus, 'special' bonus, and profession bonus (and even that last one is dubious as it can be reflected in skill cost). You don't need to worry about skill caps, or diminishing returns - at low levels the game functions perfectly well without them.
6) get away from the huge amount of chart lookup in combat. You can develop some simple calculation to determine success (e.g. hits = the amount you exceed opponent DB by, divided by Armour Type; crits = amount exceeded minus 50, divided by 5, negative = no crit, 1-10 = A, 11-20 = B, etc - note those figures are pulled from the air, no idea if they would actually work).
7) Critcally important (pun intended) is keeping detailed criticals - new players absolutely love them, since most games do abstracted damage it makes a nice change. And gamers (even the proto-gamers we are talking about here) love that detail.
To engage interest from players used to simple, fast-flowing systems, you have to create a system that is simple and fast-flowing (really!). It helps if character creation is also fast but that isn't as important - what's important in character creation is that the time is focused on the actual character, not the numbers that make it work.
Also remember that gaming is an activity that usually appeals to a certain type of individual - imaginitive and above-averagely intelligent (yes, I know there are exceptions
) so don't be too afraid of providing choice and colour, as that will be appreciated. If you can hook them into an easier system early on, then they will see it as a personal achievement to 'graduate' onto the more complex full version - much as, back in the day, we progressed from D&D to AD&D.
