Ok, I -think- I'm going insane. Was doing some fine tuning, when I noticed that in the La Noscea and Thanalan backgrounds my character resembled the og look. Then I turned her around to have light shine on her face... and it looks completely different?? I know I have prosopagnosia (face recognition disorder), but it is still weird that the change of lighting would cause the face to look completely different, which wasn't the case with the old lighting, imo. Explains why the usually very bright cutscenes of the benchmark also made her look "wrong".