I kind of like seeing different peoples' taste in character design- even if I'm not personally as fond of some colour combinations/markings as others, it leads to variety and makes things interesting. I've definitely gotten some very interesting and varied responses to Newton and his lavender eyeshadow look, though (he's in the sig).
One thing I'm sort of surprised hasn't come up is head proportions and manes/bangs. There seem to be a lot of very strong opinions about that. I have characters that have been called straight-up ugly a surprising number of times just because they don't have minimized chins/nose bridges. It's a similar deal with manes... I personally don't put bangs on characters (with the exception of lion manes) and more than once have been told that they would 'look better' if I did. And then there was one particularly interesting occasion where I was on a male leopard-like character, and a tiger with a half-mane came up and started RPing under the assumption I was female. I explained I wasn't (hapens a lot anyway, I tend to have fairly androgynous-looking characters), and he told me, as if informing me that I was breaking a rule, that all male characters had to have manes (he did say 'have to'). We had a slightly strange conversation where I tried to explain that I personally didn't like putting manes and hair on characters and everyone's entitled to design characters the way they like, and they kept insisting that all males look bad without manes and I needed to change it, and after a minute or so I jut walked away. XD
