I’ve personaly always just had a problem with justifying
Myself when it comes to starting with mutations or cbms, whats your opinion on the matter?
i always lower my stats to 4-6 per stats then add statsthroughkills + statsthroughskills + speedydex mods then work my way up, everything follows once you can take on labs for mutation/cbms or craft armors/weps. it just takes a long time because of lower drop rates as an added difficulty and luck is your best friend. 
usually my traits have deft, quick, parkour, fast learner and other nice starting traits. 0 skills.
mutation can be good as a start since it can be changed late game once you have a good access to mutagens.
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I’ve only ever started with the helicopter crash bionic soldier, it seemed reasonable to me. Some useful bionics but nothing really OP, the best probably being the intergrated nightvision. Lab start without anything extra is probably more “OP” since you can sink everything straight into stats and become more powerful overall in the long term.
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that sometimes, it still doesnt matter, you can always get an unlucky chain and boom, dead xD
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If a scenario gives me higher grade stuff from the get-go but also makes getting out of its situation alive more challenging to fit then I have no problem with good starting gear, stats, mutations, etc.
If, however, it starts as playing god amongst mortals for the sake of it then I steer clear of it.
I do wish that being an unwilling mutant gives you more of a starting threat than the brute you usually encounter outside your cell though, that dummy has had more than his fare share of escaped victims via rings around the rosy. Replacing him with a hulk would make it much harder, or spawning a mandatory hulk in a room next to the player to increase the difficulty of lab starts.
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You don’t even have to start there, there are at least three different places you can start in a lab off the top of my head. That one is arguably the mid difficulty one.
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Yeah, I can see how it can be justified to add support abilities right of the bat.
I like starting out as a shower victim. Just another survivor wandering the wasteland with her towel.
I don’t like starting with great gear but I don’t think it is the most powerful way you can tweak a character. I think what you are doing when you start with decent gear/cbms is really just shortening the span of the fun part of the game for that character as so much of the mid/late game is really just gear/cbm/spellbook/etc… acquisition.
Ultimately, the most powerful way to start a character is with great traits and stats, skills are easy and gear acquisition is just a matter of time once you know the game well (which for me is alot of the fun as you search the earth for the mono-molecular blade cbm or the right mutagen book or whatever in the mid/late game).
I don’t play with statsthroughskills as it seems way too over-powered but I do like the idea of tanking your initial stats and then gaining them by skill usage as a small counter-balance if you were going to use this mod.
I think it works out if you compensate likewise. For a long time I would start with as little as possible and work my way up, but this save I’m doing military recruit in helicopter crash. Man, starting with a full suit of clothes, a rifle and two extra mags is AWESOME. But also makes the game easier. So I also increased the spawn rate and decreased the item spawn rate to make it more difficult to advance. We’ll see how this bears in the long run.
I started as blacksmith with low stats and got lucky on a town run and ended up with a supressed m60.