Personally I absolutely love the original sprites and animations - but I also love the fact that we will eventually get to the point where simply recolouring one texture magically gives us full sets of animation for every type of body, with every type of weapon. Once a Vault 13 bluesuit has all the possible animations working properly, you change the number on the back - 5 minutes in Photoshop, and your Vault 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 etc all exist, and shortly afterwards, can be fully implemented in game too. No "animation not found" crashes and no "changing sprite when you use a particular weapon" or anything. If someone needs to add an extra animation for a mod, that animation will magically be automatically applied (in all directions) to all characters using the same base model. You can't not love that.
On the other hand, I want those models to fit into the environment and look "correct". Correct colour, correct shape, correct lighting, correct art style, everything. As close to the sprites as is possible - and I will try my best to help the people who can make this happen. I'm not the best modeller or texturer in the world, but I'm getting better. If things aren't good enough, we can always go back and improve things at a later date. The same freedom which allows us to create new characters can also be used to improve those characters. Take a texture, improve it in Photoshop, copy it into the folder. Done. Looks better.