Some of my findings

[Sabrewylf]

1) You definitely want your main character to be sturdy and be able to take a beating. A lot of the time your hird will be ambushed, and your main character will often be the guy in front and taking the full brunt of the beating. Put some points into endurance and consider equipping a shield regardless of what your actual intent with him is. I would not recommend making your main character a flimsy archer.

2) Camp skills (utility skills) are nearly pointless on your main character. Your hird will grow to consist of 9 members eventually (10 including yourself) and out of those nine you'll only be able to take 5 with you into towns and battles. The main character will always be part of the battle. It's a very good idea to have 3-4 hird members solely skilled out for the purpose of your camp, and since the MC is in every battle you want him to be solely skilled for combat. I do recommend taking Diplomacy in there though, because it offers a lot of nice roleplaying options and it's relatively cheap to max compared to other trees. Stay away from skills like cooking, preserving, guarding, etcetera, keep those for your 'camp slave' hird members. From what I can tell it looks like you can dump repairing onto a hird member as well, but I'm not 100% sure.

3) Whereas you are locked into bringing Ketill and Nefja, you are not locked into Gunnarr, Asleifr, Eydis, or Roskva. If you feel like it you can kill or exile them and just create hird members from the ground up in Ribe. This is great because you don't feel forced into going against what your roleplay-guts tells you to, and also because it allows you to fully skill those hird members as you see fit.

4) Specialised hird members: Eydis is very good as a housemaid in your camp. She starts with a bunch of nice camping skills (cooking and preserving) which give nice bonuses. I also recommend having one hird member completely specialised in crafting. I was making some ridiculous equipment doing this before I even left Denmark. Hird members who will focus on camping should always have the heavy sleeper skill, which frees them up for an additional slot. Going from 2/4 to 3/4 slots is a 50% boost in camping efficiency which all around is just great. Other than that you want to have the other camping skills maxed out too, but don't feel forced to have a specialised hird member for those. Likewise Roskva makes for an excellent healer and witch. Gunnarr is a good guard, Ketill is a good hunter.

5) From what I can tell, putting skills into one of your hird members' repairing skill simply gives you the deconstruction benefit... But I am definitely not certain. So I am cautiously recommending not to put it on your main character.

6) In general it looks like you have 3 options throughout the game: political (alliances), economic (trading), and military (combat). It's worth thinking about what kind of game you're going for because your choices will affect your followers' morale depending on their personality, and it also makes the type of ship you choose to build important. I recommend you save a game before having made certain big choices in Denmark (recruitment of your hird in Ribe and choice of longship most importantly) so you can always jumpstart a new playthrough with relative ease. If you want to take it a step further you can attempt to reach that point while keeping your MC skill points as unallocated as possible, and then create the save.

7) When crafting weapons, you can save resources by not choosing to invest into critical hit damage if you intend to give that weapon to someone with low finesse.

8) Keep Alt pressed as much as possible, which will highlight all interactables. I have come across a ton of resources doing this. Hides especially, which are worth a lot and can be found in every town and hamlet. Even herbs are great, because that means you'll have a surplus of medicine which also fetches a surprisingly high amount with traders.

9) On the topic of weapons:
Shields offer a ton of extra durability to a character and scale best with endurance.
Dual wielding gives you a ton more damage. Dual wielding seems to scale best with finesse, since it requires at least 4 of it anyway. I recommend having maxed finesse with a knife in the main hand and an axe in the off-hand. If you wish to dual wield axes you'll have to pump points into strength as well. If you want to wield a two-handed weapon, you have the choice of having a lot of damage and multi-target moves (dane axe, scales with strength) or reach and mobility (spear, scales with finesse).

For your one-handed weapon choice: swords seem the best option for doing straight up damage, as they have skills that attack pre-emptively, ignore armor, and even an execute. Axes on the other hand are great for providing utility, as they can pry away shields and weapons from enemies. These both scale with strength. If you want to carry a shield in your finesse build, look towards a knife in the main hand.

For ranged weapons you can choose between a bow and a sling. The bow is great for pure damage and can hit reliably with the rank 3 skill at even insane distances. Further down the skill tree the bow can also set people and stuff like hay on fire, and they also have a randomized AoE skill. The sling is more of a support weapon, creating cover for your team, applying AoE status effects to enemies, and even dousing them in oil to be set on fire later by for example your archer, or someone throwing a torch. Both are two-handed despite ingame tool-tips claiming the sling is one-handed. Both also scale with perception. Be sure that IF you equip your ranged characters with a helmet, that the helmet does not come with an accuracy penalty.

Unarmed seems mostly a joke, but I haven't given it a shot yet. Throwing can save teammates in a pinch, and it's also a nice way to have your melee characters apply "harried" so they can benefit from the backstabber passive. Unless you have high strength AND perception, I would not go beyond level 3 in throwing.

[Kodiak]

do you think it's worth investing into the first rank of throw (for the rock) and then into backstabber for the +50% damage? this is potentially good with skills like the daneax with reckless blow (+25%) and the sword's heavy swing (ignores DR). it's a total of like 13 (3 for throw, 10 for BS) or so points iirc

additionally, they're working on a way to deploy your guys in the same way we used to be able to in E:C, so the first point might become irrelevant as that becoems released.

but good points, +1

[Sabrewylf]

I did take level 1 throwing and backstabber. If I recall correctly it's only 11 skill points for getting a 50% damage increase. If you take it on a low perception character you'll miss more often (and thus apply harried more).

[Kodiak]

it doesn't apply harried when you hit?

[Sabrewylf]

Originally posted by Hranu:

it doesn't apply harried when you hit?

Hmm, now that you mention it, it probably does.

[VirtusIncognita]

It does apply harried and thus this is totally viable and recommended.
Other than that I agree with OP's observations and only would like to add that the repair issue mentioned in 5) can be completely circumvented by only deconstructing in camping screen. Since you only ever can use your salvage there, there is no need for the player character to dump points into it.

[Kolja]

Ive rolled such a char and it never applied harried when I hit.. unfortunately I hit very often for less than 10 dmg.. a total waste. If you hit with a bow it applies harried though.. Maybe it changes once youve a throwing axe?