Obviously, they wanted to do the graphics update, but they couldn't do very much with faces precisely because they knew this would be the reaction.

So they changed the faces just a tiny little bit. Resolution increase, smoothing the polygons on some faces, lighting/shader improvements, lip color/shader improvements, eye resolution increases...

And for those minor changes, they got all this backlash still, despite that it was a fraction of what they could have done within their new system requirements.

They have prepared a massive patch to address a lot of these concerns. I suggest waiting for that patch and then seeing if it's still a problem.