Heh, I find having the sprite helps on some routes where the MC does things I consider repugnant—the game forcing "me" to do them feels significantly more annoying than forcing "the MC" to.
Which is not to say that's better, just we're looking for different things.
Regardless, Dyne has said that the MC sprite isn't going away, for reasons mostly to do with difficulty of drawing sex scenes where one party cannot appear onscreen. Although at this point there are also a lot of dialogue boxes, side images, and so forth using the MC sprite that would probably be arduous to reconfigure.