Character graphical changes are NOT in an acceptable state, please make it optional

[Loggos]

Many are looking at the existing models with heavily rose-tinted glasses. Under certain lighting in the existing game, characters look bad.

We are not disputing that characters can look bad in the current version of the game. Many people even agree with that. What we say is that they don't look the same.
Even in the most atrocious lighting scenarios I still feel like my char is my char. She looks like a terrible gremlin but I still love her.
In the benchmark she doesn't feel like the char I want, even in the best scenes.

It is frustrating when you try to calmly and respectfully explain (as many actually have) with graphs and images that something you like about your char and have liked for years, and that was a very deliberate choice during their character creation bc charm points, has objectively been changed beyond what terrible or good lighting can achieve.

And then people essentially boil it down to rose-tinted glasses, a type of irrationality.

It feels a bit hypocritical to point out the lack of patience of those who are unhappy but then accuse us of having rose-tinted glasses despite coming to the meeting with powerpoint presentations of examples. :/

--

Edit:

I have written something about the lighting of the current game here. Putting it under a spoiler to not make this post unreasonably long for others.

The thing is, yes the lighting is terrible, esp. in the first pic. But even in the creepy flashlight-to-the-face-and-telling-you-a-horror-story lighting context I can still recognise/perceive the coherence of her features and her "facial identity" if you will.

The shadows do resculpt certain parts but through that their characteristic look still shines through so to speak.
I may think "wtf is wrong with you girl - but you're still my girl" (not my char obviously, but I think you get what I mean).

For example, as weird as the eyes look, I can still perceive that the eye shape is consistent throughout all pictures. It's the same, it's just contextualised differently.
Never did I have the feeling the lighting takes what I perceive as my character's face's personality away. It may just be unflattering.

This is why I think the "it's just the lighting, move your char out of the shadows" mindset is not helpful for me.
Besides the by now well-documented point that actual features have been altered and it's not just the lighting, if lighting were to change my core perception of their identity and they'd only feel like themslves in the right light this would still lead to a suboptimal experience.
We can't control the light in cutscenes or in environments, e.g., when we do dungeons or do quests in shady forest areas vs. well-lit plains.
So due to external forces there'd be considerable portions of the game where we would not perceive the visual core identity we have designed for our characters.

Maybe I have a strange perception in that regard but for me "unflattering" is not the same as "feels like a different person". I can live with the first one. It's how I have experienced a lot of ARR to EW and often I was like "meh this looks really weird lol" but it never felt OOC, broke my immersion or profoundly upset me.

But as soon as I saw my char in the (better lit) benchmark video I had this feeling of "no, sorry, this isn't really you :/ " and was, as a consequence, less excited and immersed in it.