Updated benchmark

[Plushy]

For me, the large pupil is a problem because the limbal rings cover the brightest part of the eye texture. Now the texture around the pupil is dark. So if you want a bright iris color like yellow, the best you can get is a greyish color, which makes her eyes look brown instead. So every eye color has become significantly darker, which is unfortunate.

?
You have to purposely TRY to mask the iris by picking certain colors and that's kinda always been the case with using limbal rings but even with doing that, you can see the iris fine...also....au ra's are cute by default.
They're literally 5'2 - 4'9 dragon girls with cutey emotes.
Heck...one of their retainers acts like a tsundere and type 4 au ra is the most anime looking design out the whole game with their really sharp unnatural eye shape.
I couldn't find the concept art design philosophy but female au ra's were created to be cute basically, because they saw how popular miqo'te was so they made female au ra cute and petite while being mysterious which is why they have a hint of shyness/reservedness in a lot of their emotes (heck even their walk animation is like a little princess walk with how they're bending their wrist a bit and clenched fingers to appear more dainty) So to try to think au ra are not cute (or not as cute as miqo'te) naturally is simply not true if you ACTUALLY play au ra because all their animations makes it clear. Compare it to something like viera, femhorth, highlander and elezen animations its obvious what they were going for with female au ra.

Look how the female raen model is standing next to the more opposing male au ra, the female au ra is giving off a sense of cuteness and gentleness.

also
here are the endwalker versions


Sure you can see the iris bit more it but that's because the limbal rings in the old version is super skinny + smaller pupils and the limbal rings in the old version doesn't blend with the iris as well (like limbal rings are actually suppose to do.) Look at the black and see how it just looks someone just placed someone on her eye instead of looking like a natural part of it.

In the end its a preference but I think its disingenuous to say you can't see the iris due to the bigger pupil and using that reason to try to get something changed when its not true at all. You can see the iris fine.