what attracts you in a character?

I kinda agree, if it's a good looking skin (not even necessarily realistic just a nice overall style) it enhances the character a lot. I also tend to dislike extremely frail characters that you can tell were made that way just so the bending wouldn't get f**ked up and it ends up with this very weird skeletal look around the arms/shoulders/armpits.

I also like if the shape is somewhat continuous, if it's a bumpier character with more deformities around the waist/hips (like big hip dips or over pronounced ribs and such) I am forced to really mess with morphs instead of just being able to add the details I want to add on my own, which is to say I appreciate the artists that give you the possibility of adding sculpted details separately or maybe some morphs for different part of the body they included in the package.

I also appreciate the longer taller figures, a thing G8/3 did better than G9. You have those short legged stocky characters on 9, and I liked the older ones better. Elongated features / taller characters look better imo.

Shape of the cranium is also something I appreciate, some characters straight up look like Yakub xd Shape of the eyes are also something I appreciate, the detail of it. Some artists really give the eyes depth and they look better in close ups.

Unique, distinctive faces, mostly cute ladies. I find that so many look the same and use less than a dozen characters. Because of the clothes I still mostly use good old Vicky Fourpointtwoplusplus with a few G3 and G8. Vicky is hard to beat because of her massive collection of expressions and poses.

Basically, I am a fan of ultra-realism, and I like variety.
Obviously some will appeal more than others, but different morphs, ethnicities, skin tones.
For instance, few merchants can really nail an East Asian face.
When that is done well it will grab my attention.
It isn't a problem, because I can adjust to my liking with Measure Metrics, but I prefer characters with a more real world height as opposed to the overly tall characters.

I just checked, apparently the average female height in the UK is 5' 3"

@zaba, that's my goal too. I'd like to have AI do the grunt work of rendering since it does fabrics sooooo much better. Any renderer chokes with fancy fabrics like Satin and organza. There's some new fashion fabrics (shimmer acetates) that are not only possessed of a unique sheen, they come in various degrees of translucency. Any renderer will throw ups it's hands in defeat while AI (once it's trained) would eat it for breakfast and return a gorgeous render.

To Charley, I found Godin makes the best characters. If you wanted a lot more info, there is an artist on Deviantart called sturkworks. He has an account on Renderosity too. He makes a lot of M4 textures.
To Ethiopia, I agree with the AI making better cloth textures. I have a friend on Deviantart that is a young model. She used her own photographs in an AI program to produce new images that were wearing the same clothes but retextured as PVC or leathers, these are a bit risque so I will leave the link out.
This is starting to turn into an ad for AI and deviantart, sorry.

@zaba Thanks for the tip; I'll check them out!