While I do not believe we'll release a "how to build the best X character" guide of any sorts, I believe we have planned to release a list of all the skills, the attributes, the effects attributes have on skills, the various limits of the skill-based system and so forth.
The basics of progression are very simple: You can skill points by doing things, and when you gain a certain number of "leveling" skill points, you gain a level. With each level, you will get some number of attribute points to add as you see fit. Pretty simple. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the gist.
And for the record, it's actually untrue that the development team has had the opportunity to progress characters in any meaningful way. The game has been changing on too frequent of a basis to really support build/progression testing, especially when as part of such changes, the character database has to be wiped and rebuilt semi-regularly.
In terms of your concerns for fairness, we'll make every reasonable effort to make sure that everyone playing the game, regardless of when in the cycle they first start playing (i.e. your three categories) will have access to the information important to playing the game.
