LogFAQs > #968385032

Julian > Rickard in pretty much every way. I think the idea is that Julian is the good Thief, and if players screw up and get him killed, being stuck with Rickard the bad Thief is their punishment. That's why FE1 has so many objectively useless units: the original expectation was that players take a lot of casualties and be okay with it.

Of course, by the time FE11 was made, FEs no longer expected that. FE11 tried to shake things up (in addition to obvious things like the mandatory sacrifice in the prologue, I believe it's the first Fire Emblem where a dead character's inventory is returned to the convoy, rather than lost forever), but it didn't really take, so... lots of pointless units in Shadow Dragon.

Although a few of the early filler twerps are diamonds in the rough. Specifically, Wolf and Sedgar have bizarrely high stat growth.