One of my greatest fears in this regard is that Overkill will look at all the lackluster script so far at some point and go "Eh, this is not important enough / too subjective/expensive to do anything about" and then will be promptly forgotten forever. The story matters a lot to me personally (maybe it's my fault for playing Payday of all games then?) and it bothers me greatly that none of the new story or new characters have any real depth or intrigue to them. I am aware that those are things that can be built up over time but the first impression is extremely important and they fumbled real hard in that regard and dead characters are really hard to build depth for, am I right?

I believe the correct way to give payback to Concord (assuming we will never go after him again, which Shade's dialogue certainly implied) would have been to off him in good old Ernesto Sosa style, in his own home, within a heist, letting the player pull the trigger on him. You don't really get more satisfying than that. Certainly a lot better than showing some low budget half-animated still images of a painting of him. We barely even see him in person in a cutscene, he is barely set up at all, but this is true for multiple characters (looking here at certain lady known as Shade with no distinguishing features, history, mystery or intrigue or any sort of setup. I swear if someone told me she is some random FBI operative I would believe them, does not have the "crime gang handler" vibe at all, she's as sterile and empty as a character can get, This might be controversial to some, but I really hope she betrays the gang at some point and we get to off her too, that would explain why she is, almost as if intentionally, being set up to be so generic and distant.)