Was This Graphical Update Necessary?

[Malthir]

Maybe I'm entirely ignorant and I've been living in a cave - but was the update a big ask in the community?

Realistically no, it's not been a huge ask or outcry from the community, it's been a small contingent of glamour focused players who cared, which is completely valid to want done not trying to insult anyone, but by in large the vast majority of players only see their characters faces in cutscenes and are zoomed out 90% of the time.
I agree with you, movement and gameplay in the game would have been a far more important fix, since that is what drives away alot of new players ( 3 core things that puts of new people. Longer GCD than most games, this is only fixed at high level when you get your mechanics and OGCD's which ties into having a poor early game exp, Movement using a ground plane makes you slide about and looks bad, UI is very un customisable in particular things like font type and colour.) . They are not even slightly competitive with the movement of nearly any MMO that's still going, with the exception of runescape.

The issue they have though, is tackling movement is going to be a beast of a job. If they attempted collision based movement, like all other MMO's do, they will have to re animate every attack action in the game. If you look at games like, New World, WoW, ESO, you see that none of their attack animations for moves are particularly long and generally only involve upper body movement, this is because you're movement is collision based so you have to allow the legs of a character to move independently to the animation triggered. It's difficult to do well and when you have an animation like say bloodspiller on the Drk, the animation is about 2-3 seconds long, or soul-eater where you character jumps as part of the attack animation so they would be left in a weird spot where they would have to either lock you in place while the animation complete, or rework every animation in the game. Option 1 while not hard is worse than what we have with the plane sliding along the ground as you can move while the animations fire, you just slide, option 2 is hard and time consuming.