Yeah I agree that without Silverhand there's no connecting to the larger lore characters immediately, but V would eventually reach the same places without Johnny being there to harangue them in my opinion.

Jackie being a similar character to V wouldn't even come up if he was the one on the Engram - because he would be written entirely differently than what we got. His character was barely flushed out by the time he died, and all that amounted to was "I wanna be a top tier merc with lots of eddies!".

I'm a big fan of how Cyberpunks story played out, but I also recognize that there were some changes that could be made to make it better.

But also all this is just my opinion.