You might argue that Exalted characters were better put into each of the Manuals of Exalted Power. There are a good number of characters of each type and it's interesting to see them all written up next to eachother (as well as giving readers a sample of all of them.) Including a character section would have added another chapter to each book so.
Mainly I want to talk about the Alchemicals. The first couple of characters are very interesting and give a vibrant new angle to the game. The real reason I want to talk about the Alchemicals though is that it's illustrative of some characteristic flaws in the writing of Exalted. In Dreadful Adjudicator of Law it describes a mystery behind the character's identity (that people would probably guess at) the takes away an opportunity for the Storyteller to turn it into a mysterious conspiracy as so often happens in the game. The opposite mistake in Thousand-Faceted Nelumbo is giving an out of game explanation that a certain detail has deliberately been left unresolved to let Storytellers use it for their own purposes.
Exalted has an annoying habit of being over-detailed in some areas that should be left to the imagination of participants, such as the exact depths of the floodwaters from the various rivers around Nexus, while being afraid of committing to their own work in a way that undermines faith in their writing, such as the alternative identities of the Bull of the North in the Compass of Terrestrial Directions. In New Breeds of Bull it says he could also be a Lunar, a deathknight, or a Fair Folk noble after categorically stating in the main rulebook and in all other material he is a Solar. Although the North did have one of the few (possibly the only) civilisations I could get my teeth into on pages 95-98 in the Zalvanesh Divers.
Going back to the Scroll of Exalts I think it would have added another dimension to the Manual of Exalted Power series if the characters had bee included in their books. Among the characters listed are all the ones on the front covers of various books. And of course you wouldn't know what their Charms did unless you had the relevant source book.
