You probably didn't participate in EA, there're only a few complaints about the face models, mainly dwarf females. The budget you said is common knowledge.
In fact, I did participate since day 1, you are new here but I wrote a preview article for this game. The faces have always been a significant issue, they addressed that in several dev updates starting 10 months ago already, and the question was asked in their Spring update stream too.
All that is common knowledge, not sure what you mean by that.
The strange thing is that the worse version was suddenly implemented, the quality is much lower, and EA players didn't have a chance to say anything about this. Yes you can still say that this is still a rational decision.
This game was perfect for me before it was released, and I'm sure many others feel the same way. That's why I think this is strange.
By "suddenly" you mean that they worked on it between the Spring update and the final release, and we only saw the new models in that release. Like any change, yes, it's sudden
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EA players didn't have a chance to say anything", there's been a lot of posts in the forums about the faces and discussion on Discord about them, since EA and after release. So they had a chance to say something, always have, but as I said, TA answered that many times by saying they would do what they could within the little resources they had. Sometimes it's not perceived as an improvement simply because of those limited resources, not because of an evil plan by someone working there, there's nothing strange or mysterious about it.
It always felt good for some, and not good for others, it really depends on subjective tastes and priorities. I'm sure that if some of the faces have turned badly in the last version and if that bothers many players, they won't object reverting them, but you shouldn't expect miracles, nor TA to ask your permission before pushing modifications to the release branch.
It's a small team and I appreciate the game for what it is, they did a great job of allocating resources to reach a good balance and yet have quite a few innovative and successful approaches to make it fun. If some areas are incomplete or imperfect, so be it, it was to be expected. They'll have a chance to improve that in a future game.