Hi! Keo here.
I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. We don't really see the current phase as the middle of the development, but rather the beginning. Until we have the whole Day 1 ready we will keep rewriting and reworking stuff, like the shorter intro or the new sprite Rune got in 0.5.3 and 0.6.1 builds. I know some of the players will dislike any changes, but I have a firm belief that in long term they're going to make this game better.
In case of Mikko, I wasn't a fan of his sprite from the beginning. We wanted to give Mikko a redesign much earlier, but we had other, more pressing matters to take care of. hq drew a few sketches of him it new outfits, but I wasn't happy with any of them either, so we experimented more with the design and the one we ended up with we liked the most and felt like it fit my vision of him the best. Now that we have a CG with him it's unlikely that we're going to change his design again, especially as it was very well received.