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

[Evergrey]

I also suspect it's about streamlining for cutscene creation purposes. A lot of cutscenes at present just use prebaked character emotes, but the stuff in the Benchmark looks a bit more bespoke. I suspect the reason everyone's mouth is suddenly a completely straight line is so that they can map the same animation onto every face without having to do any additional tweaking. Which is probably going to lead to some uncanny looking animations at times depending on your race / face.

Yeah. Before the benchmark, as far as I can remember anyways, the player model dont do anything outside of basic ingame emotes/animations.
Where in the BM, like you mentioned, the animations were more bespoken.
And for that new riggings would be needed unless the old facial textures and bones would stretch and perhaps even clip into itself.
So ye, that's my only logical guess as to why some changes had to be done, some more drastic than others.