Humm... The issue here is that there's often a fine line between what one person calls "flair" and what another calls "foolish". Not to dismiss your ideas as the latter, but when I visualized your suggestions in my own mind, they struck me as belonging to a gameworld with a much more comical or quirky bent. (Although maybe that has more to do with the cutsey, chibi-esque images that are often innately conjured by my own mind)
*Cough* ... Oh, and yes. I am aware that we have legions of quirky, obese, religious frog-people, riding around on mechanical walking chairs. But I really consider that example to be akin to a statistical outlier. 
