Man why are they so horrid to look at? Every single one of them is super frumpy. What happened to the original models? Why has god forsaken us?
If by original models you are talking about the original Lab Rats game's models, it would have been a lot harder to use the honey select-based models to dynamically handle procedural generation of physical traits that is needed for the concept in Lab Rats 2.
You can custom make 5 or 6 characters and use honey select's poser features to make all the images you need for all the scenarios for a game like lab rats that has a small set number of static characters and a relatively small number of static events that happen with each character.
Lab Rats 2 on the other hand is a sandbox... and I mean you could probably still use honey select to make 5-6 static characters and all the poses you'd need for all the interactions... but all of your characters would always look like one of those 5-6 static characters... imagine a company of 37 people all of which look like clones of one another. Plus I'm not sure you could have a wardrobe system using honey select because you'd have to render an image for EVERY combination of every pose and every possible combination of clothing.... it's just not feasible.
Going from something as static as Lab Rats which is essentially a finite number of "slides" with menus and a hud overlayed on top to Lab Rats 2 which is more like a sandbox with nearly all the aspects of the characters (clothes, personality type, hair, eyes, face, body type, breast size) set up to be able to make probably millions of unique characters (based on the number of combinations of each of the things above are available)... you're just going to have to sacrifice a bit in the models department. At least for a renpy game since renpy is essentially an enriched slideshow viewer.
You can have beautiful looking renders with static models... or you can have a vast variety of randomizable characters. Having both would almost certainly require using something other than renpy... and very likely would require a budget and a team much bigger than just 1 person.