Oh please, if you want a good sprite set, what's stopping you from making them yourself? You criticise what's available as not being good enough, yet, no one takes action because reasons. My fault for snapping, but I'm a little tired of these nitpicky criticisms from you. Can't you be happy with what we have? This game is reliant on people with free time and true passion to go out of their way to make what we see as amazing material (minus the half-operating netcode).
I am not a spriter. Just because I don't sprite doesn't mean I can't criticize other sprites. With your logic, game reviewers shouldn't be allowed to criticize games from developers if they aren't developers themselves. "Because reasons"; not everybody has the patience or skills required for pixel art. Why don't you sprite, Duon? At this point, I am pretty happy with what we have on SRB2. Some high quality stuff is being released and more is going to be released in the future. I appreciate people who produce content and sacrifice their time, but that's not going to stop me from voicing how I feel or any issues I see with the content.
Sonic hasn't been changed since 1.08.
Tails hasn't been changed since 1.08.
A lot of the enemies haven't been touched since 2.0.
Most of the scenery hasn't been touched since 2.0 or earlier.
So, with assets that old, tell me, what from 2.1 makes these skins look completely alien? Most of the game's assets are older than those skins but suddenly they're bad compared to the entire game because one of 2.1's characters got revamped? That doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter how outdated they are, if they look good, they look good. If they don't, they don't. Just saying that they're outdated isn't a valid argument.
Sonic already is changed, or at least will be by v2.2.
Tails probably will within the next 2-3 years at least.
Knuckles has been.
Most of the Badniks are fine as of v2.0 aside from Snailer, who was recreated last year, and Buzz.
All of the levels are growing a lot better both aesthetically and gameplay wise, especially with the recent addition of slopes in vanilla.
All of the recent content released or that is being developed is growing in quality too.
I guess what my initial point was is that everything else in SRB2 is still changing and developing into something better. Old wads that the official creators don't even update anymore, that are from years ago, are not in that same flow. The other thing I was trying to say is that those old skins created by the likes of CZ64 and .Luke were more so fair quality in older versions of SRB2, especially back in the Final Demo era; and that most of them are starting to degrade more in quality
compared with the new things released/in dev, which I previously explained. Personally, I think Espio.wad isn't very good looking in general. On a lot of frames he looks derpy, and you can blatantly see how it was built on top of SSN's Sonic. CZ's Charmy is essentially the same animation of him flapping his wings for most of the wad. The best one is Vector, who I still find weird in some areas. Also, none of these characters have proper balancing frames and are probably missing others that I forgot. But that was pretty common for character wads around the time these ones were first released.
But whatever, I hope you can understand where I was coming from.