I actually was looking at buying the old bg1&2 on steam and saw the excessive portrait packs pushing the price up to $90. I can do without portrait art. I know that was really popular in early 2000s with nwn and such, but I went back and looked at them and they are a bit....bad. Some are exactly what you accuse bg3 of, cartoony and caricature, to the point of being tacky. Some are obviously real photos that had fantasy art put over them.
The point of the current portait system is to represent the character you have. Having art that isn't the face of the character is "immersion breaking" as I keep seeing people say on the forums. Having multiple pieces of the characters doing different poses is unnecessary to me.
Also consider character creation in the older games didn't have you pick hair/face/eye color/skin tone/tattoos/makeup/etc. So portraits then are character customization cosmetics that we do now with the actual character models.
