I suspect that the developers deliberately did not include any disadvantages into the game in order to prevent excessive min/maxing. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, min/maxing is when you take a number of low-impact disabilities in order to strengthen one or more key advantages.

The idea is to produce a very specialized race and adopt a strategy that makes your weaknesses totally irrelevant. Vorlin gives several examples of how this can be done (ie. take soldiering penalties and go for cultural victory).

When I first got a look at the traits section of the game, I was somewhat pleased that there were no penalties or disadvantages. As countless generations of RPGs and strategy games have shown, min/maxing tactics are almost always more effective than a build designed without 'penalties'.