Makes me kind of sad.. I wanted to like it but I just stopped 1/3rd way through mostly because of the honey select models. I played a few honey select games and the more I played them the less I like the game that uses them. I also feel the same for reused non morphed daz models, but it's much harder to do anything with honey select it seems. But perhaps it's just me being a more of visuals enjoyer of adult games.
Koikatsu can be even worse in that regard, but yes, Illusion games as well as the Daz3D clone army can have that feel. You can make a lot of adjustments to great effect, and I actually think that this game is doing a decent job with the available resources, but in the end there will always be a certain style to the renders with which one can be fed up, at least for a while. So the main draw for me is whether the characters are interesting. As for looks, of course they matter to a degree, and some devs are incredibly lazily just using stock models with the maximum "creative" input being just maxing the T&A sliders. And some actually do put work in but don't realize how their personal taste takes over in making everybody beautiful in the same way, resulting in all girls being sisters. And that's not even beginning to mention the males ...
But yeah, if your HS dislike won't go away, that's a pity (not least because there are tons of good HS games you'll miss), but nothing really can be done.