If you are writing in someone else's narratorial and authorial voice you are likely not writing to your strengths. If I vote in the voice of Douglas Adams, characterisation would take second or third place to ideas. Douglas Adams himself agreed the Arthur Dent was a stereotype. The hitchhikers was about ideas not characters. Wilma and housemates is about both. If I had to choose characters are more important than ideas this is because a character such as Sheldon Cooper can literally last hundreds of episodes and idea can't however perhaps a setting can.