I also get the feeling that some of the reworked characters, especially when it comes to the core cast, have lost some of that distinct unique feeling. Jeanne is the best example as she now looks like a slightly nerdier version of the mom or sister reworks. But they're not bad models at the end of the day.
I want to expand on this a bit, so long-ass post inbound. As far as the quality of the models go, there's nothing inherently wrong with them. They check some boxes, and they do get the job done. If this is what the game started off with, then I'm sure a lot of people would still be very happy with the game. However, a lot of the criticism coming forward is taking into account what the game was like before these complete facelifts.
I don't know for sure if the dev is using one of those anime character creators that a lot of anime porn games seem to share, but if he is then the results he made stood out quite a bit from everything else. It's what drew me into his game in the first place. The old models were definitely rough around the edges, but they each looked unique and had a lot of charm and quirks about them that made them stand out not only against his own cast of characters, but every other porn game on the market.
While you can make the argument that these new models are, on a technical level, "better" than the old ones, they've lost everything that made them so iconic to begin with. They feel generic and lack that personal touch that was there before. You could honestly stand these characters side-by-side with any other generic anime porn game and they'd probably fit right in and you couldn't really tell them apart. You can even see people in this thread getting confused about who is who between the cast shown thus far. It feels like the difference between someone making their art, flaws and all, and someone using a generic AI art generator.
I get that he did this because the pipeline he had was plagued with issues, but a whole and total rework I think was the worst possible idea he could have done outside of just abandoning the project. He established a fanbase off of what he had made, but instead of making adjustments to his current cast to help alleviate the pipeline, he instead chose to actually start completely over. This clearly divided his fanbase, so now instead of all his current fans standing behind him, he alienates a decent amount of people who really liked his work.
Moreover, the dev has already expressed that he had been getting burnt out on his work even before he started this rework. Now that does factor into the pipeline he had with the models before, but I would argue that his workflow in general is going to lead to the exact same results. He spent sleepless nights generating thousands of unique images for every single conversation when all that effort amounted to slight head tilts throughout the dialogue. I appreciate the hard work, but he does not know how to prioritize his workload. With all the effort and time he's putting into these new models, I don't think there's any way he's going remain motivated to get back on that treadmill to deliver the same quality product he made before. At least not without sacrificing any semblance of reliable and regular updates.
We'll see though. I'll keep my eye on things and discuss what's happening, but I really don't have a lot of optimism for this product.