Attractive characters improve games. True or false?

[Torillian]

chakkra said:

Torillian said:

But it's also a game where you yourself take issue with the gameplay. Maybe they spent a bit too much time  on these designs you like so much rather than the game. 

Err.. I really do not think that the attractiveness of a character and the time designing them correlates at all.

Designer: "Sir, should I make this female character look feminine and attractive to appease to the largest group of gamers possible?"

Exec: "Nah.. that will take too long. Just make her look like a man, that´ll do it. We need to focus on gameplay!"

I agree, but I operate in the space where people often say a game was made worse because of political design choices. That they focus too much on these things rather than making the game good. And so I'm just applying that same logic here. If you can focus too much on political correctness to the detriment of your game design, you can probably also focus too much on character aesthetics.