Yes, an artist community take bikeshedding advice from a community with a skew from the tech industry. That always ends well.

>the cartoony fantasy artists may be only ones tolerating it. So with this mascot they will select for such demographic.

Sounds like a chicken and egg situation.

Regardless, it's a classic business question. When you become an established piece of software due to community efforts, do you try to become more mainstream at the cost of metaphorically betraying the very community that got you such visibility? History says thst it is the most profitable venture but a surefire way to become the very thing these open source initiatives strove to oppose. So it's not exactly a road I will personally champion (nor oppose per se. In some ways the founders do deserve such riches. And I'd probably take them myself on their shoes).

The only benefit here is that such a change has a chance to fork the project if there are enough unsatisfied customers. But forking can still get messy.