Okay People, a Little Lesson!

[Shawn]

Ugh, the primary difference between quality of a spriter who edits and one who does customs is the general skill of the person themself.

Edits are a common starting point for many spriters, even I did edits for a couple months when I started out. Since it's just a starting point(hopefully), it's natural the person making the edits is a fairly new spriter and hasn't grasped the basic yet and will keep doing this until they're ready to go off on their own. Think of sprite edits as training wheels for spriting. Custom spriters usually feel they have a good grasp of the basics and begin to make everything from scratch. Edits that are better than customs are often made by people who are already good at spriting and customs, the reason the edit wouldn't be acceptable though for that specific person would be because we know they're capable of things greater than sprite edits. Alternatively, customs that are bad are usually by people who haven't gotten the basics down, meaning they're just lacking in skill or avoided the editing part.

tl;dr, The quality of sprites depends on the spriter. Edits are a good kickoff point but beyond that, they're just dissapointing.