While I think this is an awesome addition to the game to allow people to customize their Hiro to their liking I do think you are jumping the gun here because like you said changing all that art that will be quite the major undertaking which brings me back to my initial point.
Why introduce these changes now since it will only reflect on the character screen and in the text cut scenes but not in any of the still images and sexual encounters? Of which these make up over 90% of the game instead of finishing things first like adding animation for the rest of the characters or adding story content?
This change would also break immersion for me instantly if I chose to play as a dark-skinned blonde only to see a pale white brunette the majority of the time? It's why for my mod I took the time to go through every single image and make sure each one matches up as best I can.
As far as Hiro goes there is just something about the new face that looks off to me. Maybe it's because I'm used to the old one and I just need some time to adjust. Once I get a chance to customize and play with her look maybe I will change my mind. Like I said I do very much like the little facial emotes. I also think the animation is much smoother now across the board as well.
I wish you continued success with the game and I look forward to the changes. As far as developers of these kinds of games no one else is your pier in terms of adding additional content in a timely fashion. I would just like to see some of the focus being given to the game side of things for change if I'm being honest. I would love to see the story mode really take off as well as additional quests made available and places to explore like caves and dungeons. Otherwise, this could have been all been done as a VN istead of an RPG but I'm glad it's not because it's the RPG aspects that drew me in the first place.
The whole game is a major undertaking. There's an obvious benefit to having the character customizable like this, and so we've decided it's worth it to do it, and people are quite pleased with it. The reality is that it's already immersion breaking not to have certain aspects of your character (for instance, the chastity cage) not reflected in the CG art, so we're going to have to have an engine in place for those things to be reflected anyway. And I reject the premise that having the character customization only reflected in certain places is pointless: it's actually ubiquitous in video games for that to be the case, where a character's armor, weaponry, race, or other customization might be reflected in some interface or other but not in-game cutscenes, or portraits, or other interfaces, etc. The more of that that's consistent, the better, of course, but it's not abnormal, and certainly not pointless, to have character customization that isn't universally applied, any more than it is to have mirrors that only reflect the player character, or only reflect the static elements of a scene.
As for the game side of things: right now I'm coding for more dynamic animation variation when it comes to things like expressions and gestures, new fonts and Cyrillic character support, new chastity cage and other cock adornments, and on the writing side I'm working on new prostitution scenes for Hiro, more Ogre scenes, alternate dialogue for various states of feminization, and when that's all done the next part of story mode. Explorable dungeons will come, but it'll have to wait. Story mode will be getting the brunt of the focus once everything that precedes it in either priority or dependency is done.