8 Year timeskip

Can we please get past the tired notion that only amoral, greedy people would become Lords of Fortune? Off the top of my head, I can think of several options that have nothing to do with simply enriching one's self:

-Lack of realistic and/or legal opportunities where they live.

-Desperate to lift themselves and/or their families out of poverty. Bonus points if they need expensive medicines for loved ones.

-Fund worthy causes that don't get enough attention.

-Back revolutions against oppressive regimes, and help sustain stability and independence afterwards.

-Help reclaim lost culture.

-A genuine love of adventure and discovery.

Anyone of these could be answers we could give when asked why we became a potential Lord of Fortune. Right alongside "I really like money" lol.

I don't seem to recall that we got any choice about being a Grey Warden but at least you could choose your race and origin background. With Hawke you got only one choice for your race and background and the option of mercenary or smuggler for profession when you got to Kirkwall. With Inquisition the choices for background were human noble with pro-Chantry family; Dalish elf whose Keeper sent you to spy on the Conclave; Dwarf working for the Carta or Vashoth mercenary but you are then forced to become a member of the Inquisition and have a religious title thrust upon you, no matter how much you object. With Mass Effect and the single protagonist throughout, we had no choice about becoming a N7, 3 early backgrounds and 2 career scenarios.

So the choices have always been limited by virtue of the fact that as Hero11n7 says, it is a computer game and they have to have a basis for the programming.   The less set character aspects, the more bland the character becomes with no grounding in the world or potential for different reactions and plot lines based on the one you select.
Both Hawke and the Vashoth Inquisitor can start out as a mercenary. Whilst Hawke has to make a morally dubious choice to do this, there is no suggestion that the Vashoth has not been able to pick and choose what they do. A mercenary does not have to take a job, although if they are part of a larger mercenary group it may be forced upon them, and it might be wise to check the fine print of any assignment they take on. A freelance mercenary though can have a strict moral compass and be known for the fact that there are certain jobs they just won't do.

Incidentally, correct me if I am wrong, but weren't Ser Aaron and Vaea originally just freelance mercenaries? Otherwise, how exactly did they earn a living?   A mercenary is simply someone who gets paid for doing a job.   From that viewpoint most people are mercenaries.   In fact it was the entire basis of the Chanter's Board in DA2 and DAO and the other contacts in DAO, like the Mages Collective, and the Mage Underground in DA2.   You don't have to take these jobs but if you do you are doing so as a mercenary, even if you profess to be doing it out of the goodness of your heart.

It may be that the trade-off in DA4 is that by giving us a limited choice of profession, they are able to be more flexible with race or early background.   Or they could do as they did for earlier games and you have a fixed background depending on your race, including your starting profession but that changes fairly quickly after that.

So his entire life had been based on story telling? Also, why the squire? He is a knight and a warrior. I should imagine that at some point he earned a living by using his sword. May be he only did so for king and country. That is all very well if the king is a good one. That is my point. We tend to deride the term mercenary as though using your skills for money for a job you have chosen to take is bad but serving in the army of a despot out of loyalty to the state is good. A mercenary doesn't have to be an unscrupulous killer. They may be poorer as a result but it is possible to be a moral mercenary. I think that is the whole basis for the Seven Samaurai/Magnificent Seven plot. A village is under constant threat of bandits who exploit them; they pool their money to hire mercenaries to protect them and the majority of the mercenaries end up dying in order to give those villagers a better life. Would your PC refuse to be part of that group of mercenaries?

A merchant has lost multiple caravans to bandits.  He hires some mercenaries to protect his caravan.   Now his caravans are safe because the bandits do not dare attack them.  No one has died but a merchant has been able to maintain his livelihood and you have been paid for the service.   That is the staple fare of mercenaries.   What is bad about that?
Which is better than a mercenary because.....? A thief is essentially someone who steals things. They are depriving another person of their possessions. A good thief can justify this, as Vaea does, by saying they only steal from richer people and they do it to help the poorer ones but it is still theft. In fact in the first series Vaea also steals because Charter blackmails her, threatening to reveal the fact she is a thief if she doesn't do what Charter asks. This might be stealing for the Inquisition and it might ultimately have good results, but her reason for stealing was to protect herself from the accusation, not any noble ideals. Bottom line a thief is a thief, just as a mercenary is a mercenary. You cannot deride one without doing the same for the other.

I meant bland in that you cannot tie in anything specifically to your character. It has to be wholly generic. So they give you multiple professions for you to choose from. That is great but apart from the odd line where people ask what you do, that is where it ends. They cannot possible tailor individual sub-plots based on that profession or have people recognise you based on that profession because it would take up far too much programming time and resources to do so. Even with the limited choices in DAI, much of the time the differences between us were largely in War Table missions tailored to our background or a few lines of dialogue. If they had expanded that choice further, those individual elements would necessarily have reduced. In DAO, your background choices were limited depending on the race we chose and we had only one career path, a Grey Warden, just as in DAI you had only one career path, that of Inquisitor.

I must admit one of the things I preferred about DA2 was that for the majority of the game I was Hawke and not Warden, Herald or Inquisitor and whilst in Act 3 people who were not friends referred to me as Champion, I was still Hawke to my companions. Unfortunately, I do not see how they can incorporate that more personal touch without narrowing our choice of starting character.

I think a mercenary background could work, especially if we get the choice to roleplay on whether we want to be a cold calculating 'fuck you pay me' style mercenary or one that is more considerate with his charges. I always liked that in Witcher 3 you can choose to play a Geralt that will make a poor old lady part with her last coins for a job or a Geralt that is more lenient depending on the situation.

Josie also hires an assassin guild to protect her ships.

Also I'm with everyone else here especially these days. Good mercenaries. Bad mercenaries. All of which are things but that does not mean its inherently bad to earn a living as one either just like how it's not bad for soldiers to earn their living. After all the Inquisition was a mercenary organization.

plus to your point earlier all the WT missions usually netted us some kind of reward even if it wasn't money.

This would be cool.

I believe most Vashoth are mercenaries because the only ones who have the ability and opportunity to escape the Qun are warriors. And consequently, fighting is the only real skill they have. So their options become limited to banditry or mercenary work.

That was annoying after everything we learned about Cerberus in ME1 but they did seem to be the only organisation doing something effective against the Collectors. In fact a better analogy would be forcing us to work for any particular organisation, unless we had to option to reject them at a later date as we did with TIM. If they do decide to go with a fixed background, it is more likely to be that of treasure hunter mercenary, as in a Lord of Fortune, owing to the fact that they suddenly decided to introduce this group in Tevinter Nights when we had never heard of them previously.

I'm hoping rather that belonging to a faction is something we will have a choice over and a background will be more generic than that. A lot depends on whether we are going to be able to play as different races or not. If we are then I think each background will be tailored to that race. Alternatively, as I've always maintained, we could start off as a slave in a noble house, which would fit every race (I'm sure that casteless dwarves can be slaves) and every class (mages can be slaves) and we progress from there.   The choice of individual background would relate to how we became a slave in the first place.