I do wish the Xaela were a little different from the Raen.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

You say Miqo'te look okay as hunters and Au Ra aren't when they have fairly similar proportions, and class/job animations are all the same besides Lalafell and Roegadyn with tweaks.
Xaela are basically nomads. There's also Xaela NPCs on a few quests like the job quests and the Alexander storyline.

I think that is more story developers with a brief disconnect from the game's lore. However that is kind of like the Dark Elf in Zek in EQ2 who is helping good guys. A small exception to the race and culture. Dark Knight one didn't have much information about the character himself, story was mostly about the girl if I remember. Don't want to spoil though.

In the reveal of Au Ra, there was no lore description accompanying it but they still looked the same 'til this day. Unless you missed that.
The females never looked intimidating, ever.

Concept Art did though. Also the reveal of Dark Knight had completely different animations and graphics to it. A lot of them were removed and replaced with like the .. red cloud of hurts my eyes.

A lot of all of this problem though could be solved with customizable animations like voices at start. Pick what your race 'can' be.