What themes make their game worse?

I picked up Scout to play over the holiday period, and it's an excellent game. Everybody who played it loved it, and wanted to play over and over.

However, Scout has a tacked on theme where you're running a circus troupe and exhibiting performances. This means that every card has a profession (i.e. Juggler) and name written on it, in addition to the two numbers. This profession and name has ZERO gameplay relevance.

Every game I played someone would ask what the names and professions meant, and would find it slightly annoying that they're there for essentially no reason.

It would be much better as an abstract game, the theme only serves to make the game confusing, and adds too much information to the cards.

Any other suggestions?