Actually, the word that he used, might have been better being described as “stereotypical homosexual male”, that actually describes the problem with playing the character itself, as I assume Sean doesn’t want his stealthy and evil Sylvari thief having that side of him. And even regardless of the sexuality, I might add that even if the character would be homosexual, given it adds some depth to the character, even give certain motivation for the character being so cold, as having to suppress this side of the personality as “not fitted for his image”, the comment does sound literally gay, in sense of: “merry – cheerful – jolly – joyful – blithe – mirthful” that is where the mocking word originated before it was sexually racist expression.
So, I DO catch your drift on the line of not using the word as in the common meaning it is used in the common language, but in this case it is something that defines the character to have a certain type of personality. As it is, would it be impossible for the voice actors (the ones that exist, and maybe even new personnel) to create more “voice profiles”, that people could choose from, so that role playing a character would be more “pleasant” in order that people could have chaotically mad Azuran scientists, or emotionally unbalanced Sylvari etc. giving the characters far more depth in the end, and would not conflict with the original idea of the character (as this would be a new improvement that many would probably wish to apply on Lv.80 characters even, I would give the people an option to change/keep the voice setting on characters that are in existence).
Now, I know that, as high quality soundscape means LOADS of space on discs, I would imagine that it would be wise and generous to provide option to download only low/high quality character samples, if the overall size of the game is used as an explanation of why it would be difficult to execute. However, if this is the case, I would feel that the same could be done for the textures, as higher resolution textures that are not used, are quite useless HD space used
Also, as it seems, people are annoyed by CERTAIN commentary, but not all, the tweaking could be taken so far that people could choose (tick use/don’t/disapprove) for their characters, and adding the “disapprove” in the mix would add more interaction for the in-game characters, given they can then comment (probably client side) on the expressions that other characters use. However, this means a loads of code, and being a feature that would not probably be in active use, I understand easily if this is not too visible in the menus (given it is implemented at all), but rather something people can tweak if they will from example opening a popup menu in the character selection screen, and choosing to “modify the commentary”.