I'd say the issue is that "harsh, dramatic lighting" often just looked really bad. In those quoted examples above, the new one looks better every time to me because the old shadows were terrible. They often also ended up highlighting all the issues with the old face models.

To my knowledge, they haven't fully updated all the old zones with the new lighting and such yet, so that's probably a big reason why your character sticks out sometimes. The character models are using the new shaders but the environment hasn't been updated to reflect that yet.