> Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask?

DF has over ten intelligent species, countless animals and other creatures that include oddities like weresloths. Should all of those be drawn in different orientations? There is a lot of variety you could add graphically based on, say, a dwarves' current activity, mental state and so on but you have to draw the line somewhere if the game is supposed to actually release. They did make some other improvements like a less cryptic graphical representation of terrain.

From what I've seen a lot of the development work for the Steam release was about reducing the technical debt that accumulated over the years and now just had to be paid in order to integrate new features and improvements.