For a first episode of a genre show, I thought they did a good job setting it up. Most of my favourite scifi shows have very weak first episodes, because there's so much to establish, and they're usually double episodes.
Well, there wasn't really much need since the characters were fairly formulaic. Strong girl, racist, ex-wife, a couple of slackers, done. You don't need establishing stories about feeling the emotions of others, seeing the entire EM spectrum, working for your dead husband's boss, or whatever. They covered the principle group in 3 minutes then moved on.
You're pretty much right, although being a scifi show, you still have to establish the setting, the dynamic of the world. Again, not a ton to establish yet, but it's still a fair amount to fit into 45 minutes of screen time. They balanced it as well as can be expected imo.
And for now the characters only had time to be briefly introduced, so I'd only expect the surface level cliche character tropes at this point. Bortus has a (male) partner we're yet to even see, many of the characters got little dialogue yet, etc. I expect and hope they'll get fleshed out over time. It's designed to be episodic rather than serialized, so it probably won't be a character development focused show, but there's still more to cover. Either way, I'm definitely interested in more.