Yeah, some people are worked up about the design changes, but really all of these alterations so far have been relatively mild in order to serve practical aesthetic, or gameplay purposes. Fundamentally the characters are the same. Qadira's still a masked warrior in dense armor that carries a shield, and Baozhai's a fiery one-eyed pirate that fights with a personalized cannon and harpoons.
The way I see it, what we're being introduced to now are like the "real" characters, the ones that will actually live in Ajna's world and do cool stuff in battle. I think once more people start seeing them in action, and in the story, there probably won't be much reflection on the details of the old concept art anymore. It's like how a lot of people felt about Alex's redesigns for Peacock and Ms. Fortune at first, relative to today.
Now, if you guys had suddenly changed Baozhai into a redheaded TV News reporter in a yellow jumpsuit, then I think we'd have a lot more to get worked up about!