We've only really been talking about the core rules here, but there's a lot more to an edition of Shadowrun than that.
A friend loaned me some of his old SR2/3 books and reading some of them, I'm blown away by how clear they are. More meat to the adventures (maps!), clear explanations of what's going on in the metaplots, rather than the Jackpoint stream-of-consciousness mess, and just generally clear and readable.
Based on that, maybe SR2 and 3 are the best editions after all. I find it really hard to figure out what's really going on in books like Clutch of Dragons, Storm Front and Bloody Business. The older books spell it out rather than wasting many pages on Jackpoint speculation.
On life paths:
Several Space Opera games (Traveler, a couple of Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40k RPGs) do something similar to Life Paths. What Kind of Planet were you from, get these things, what sort of school did you go to, get these other things, Military service get those other things. At least one version of Call of Cthulhu and some of the Twilight 2000 series have a life path lite. Harn is a three or four step Life Path char gen system.
That's just off the top of my head. It's not the most common char gen method in RPGs, but its been around for a very long time.
Diaspora, a space RPG using Fate, also has one (no idea if this is standard in Fate). Fate relies heavily on aspects, so you describe your youth, get a few aspects from that, then describe a crisis, in which the character of the player to your right played a role and get an aspect from that, then how you helped the character to your left in their crisis, get an aspect, etc. So you get history, aspects, and relationships between the characters all in one go. Pretty neat idea.
Traveller is of course legendary for having the possibility that you die during character creation. It's less about who you are and more about in which branches of the military you served and whether you got promoted or got hurt.