OK, I want to be able to change this stuff and I don't care if there is an in-world explanation for it.

I don't want to spend two hours on the character builder because I'm not sure if I got my eyebrow colour right and I'm afraid that if I get it wrong then I'm stuck with it.

I want to pick roughly what I want and then see if I can live with it. If I make a mistake then I want to be able to fix it easily.

Most of the lip colours were too garish. Could we have better selections? And how about options that fit better with our skin tones? I picked dark skin and found little that went well with that.

Same issue here. I wanted to try out different eye and lip colors but most of them seemed really out of place with the skin colors that were available. And I think you're right - it was more pronounced with the darker skin colors. Too many neon and pastel highlight colors. Sky blue lips on dark brown skin looked like someone had drawn my lips on with sidewalk chalk. I remember a particular shade of neon green lips that didn't seem to work with ANY skin color. I actually spent several minutes trying to find a face and skin color that looked good with that color of lips, because in theory I liked the idea, but I just couldn't find one that worked. I'll bet that some of them look better on a zoomed-out full-body model (like in the tower) than they do in a close-up, but the close-up was all I had to work with at that point. Another argument for being able to change your look later, really. If that were an option, you can try the overly garish stuff and see if it looked ok at a different scale, and change if it didn't.

Most of the face paint patterns were like, "are you serious?"

Have to agree here. Though again, I suspect some of them probably look better zoomed out, or maybe with particular gear.

I think that mass effect did character design better.

Yes and no. It was definitely easier to come up with something that wasn't just outright weird, but you were also limited to pretty standard human faces (assuming we're talking about the single-player, anyway).

Where did you get such pretty pics of your armor???