Same thing here Skye, only I used Orlandu on my first time through, seeing as he started off doing twice the damage that the character I replaced was doing, not to mention Orlandu was a bigger guy, and all his attacks had range and basically killed anything in one hit.

But yeah, the first time through, you build up your generics and think "Gee I can't replace these, I spent too much time on them!", but in your next game, you find that you don't need to spend so much time on your generics, you can just go through until you get story characters, who when built up have most all the best skills.