We need to compromise as a player base

[Taliriah]

I'd argue that if you can't upgrade the graphics without affecting the unique visual identity and style of characters that players have been attached to and playing for literal years, then you shouldn't be 'upgrading' the graphics in the first place.

Why can't it be a character option so people can keep the look they have always had? Have the 'objectively better' loss of facial hair as an option, and the 'objectively worse' scruffy look as an option so people can keep their same style if they want to. If anyone should be compromising, I believe it is the developers, whose goal should be to improve the graphics without completely changing how characters look.

1. Ask any digital artist and they'll tell you that everything is interdependent. If you improve the shading, then you have to re-rig the lights, because the old light rigs have been designed around the specific limitations and idiosyncrasies of the old shading. And color perception everywhere will be affected. That's just how it is. All the visual elements work together, you can't change one without affecting the others.

I'm not a video game artist but I work with them and I can't tell you how often they have looked at me in horror whenever I ask dumb programmer questions like "do you really need to be able to preview X and Y with the exact same time of day/weather used in the actual ingame event where it is used?"

(This is why, lacking any evidence that the character creation backdrops have been reworked, it is probably irrelevant to complain about the lighting there)

2. In general, a graphic update consists in adding more information to shapes and textures to define them better. The thing is, when that extra information was missing, people were filling in the blanks, and they were doing that subjectively. That bit you perceive as integral to your character's look may be perceived as an ugly artifact by someone else.

Therefore there is no objective way to fill in the missing information.

Making old and new versions coexist as an option is also impossible, see point 1: the lighting and weather have to match with the character shading.

So, in light of this, should they not have done this? Hell no. There's a million things that look wrong in 6.0 and I don't think the game should be held back by conservatism. And since it's all so subjective, it means you'll get used to it anyway.

TL;DR: you'll get over it.