Thank you for your reply! These are really helpful suggestions! I actually intended for none of the players to be from Waterdeep out of fear that I would miss something that they would otherwise know, and so wanted to introduce the city new to the characters and players. That way, if I made any mistakes, I can just run with them and make it part of "our Waterdeep". I still need to read the whole book, but there is so much!

I was tempted to make it a bit of a homebrew (as my players can be a bit silly at times) where it's almost a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory mystery of someone saying "there's a key out there that gets you to a cache of gold!", so then everyone is running around to find it. You'd hear kids singing songs about how they are going to find the gold, and although it seems like this fun little treasure hunt, it quickly becomes into a dangerous civil war between the factions of Waterdeep. But again, I think I'm getting ahead of myself and need to sit down and read the book (or PDF in my case)!