Thanks again for all the feedback! Lots of controversy which makes it harder to decide one way or the other, but perhaps we can reach the best of both worlds.
Replying to questions:
This has mostly been a consensus particularly with regards to the feet. I do want the character to remain distinct from Minecraft and Roblox. Personally I recollect on the original Roblox character fondly. Ironically considering this topic I agree that the newer ones do not have the same charm. As Rain pointed out, constraints can be helpful for creativity. Does anyone have thoughts on what would make the feet less of an issue?
Perhaps I am misinterpreting, but the glove design I want to return to are the meshed gloves from earlier in the beta which had a cutout for the “fingers”.
FWIW, the current bendy character on the 4 beta version should not have the gun in their shoulder. The main improvement that helped reduce that was allowing the upper body to rotate 30-45 degrees away from the hips. Both the bendy and blocky character should benefit from this.
Theoretically I would love to program a game with character designs like those, but cannot imagine modeling without exact measurements and dimensions. For Unturned I think that might stray too far from the art style as well. It reminds me of this post: Interesting character style concept art
Interesting idea. I think this really changes the feel of the hands though, whereas proposed cube design holds items in a similar manner to the old design. Here is the rotated hand:
True, it would be possible to keep the hips and shoulders connected to the torso. Those connections are the cause of some hideous distortions however, like the Bluntforce example.
In case it impacts your opinion, I would like to note that a “final” modeling of the blocky character would have similar gaps, but might have slightly adjusted dimensions.
Agreed! I think it would be especially useful to separate the eyes and mouth for aligning eyes with masks and glasses.
It does have promise. At one point I did experiment with that rather than feet. In my opinion it felt wrong for the arms to have hands without the legs having feet. Something like the detail level being inconsistent across the character, whereas all the current characters have a similar level of detail throughout the body.
To clarify: it was not the gloves themselves that were in the awkward position there, it was the inner forearm, elbow, and outer shoulder that did not make sense.
Unfortunately this works best with a single axis of rotation like elbow and knee, whereas the hands need to rotate freely.
Yeah my bad. I have been too fussy with 4 since the beginning. 
I briefly experimented with a thinner even blockier character:
As a messy example of why I am hesitant to taper the arm, I do not like how the intersection between upper and lower looks:
Interesting point. This was more true in the early days, but there are a lot of smooth-shaded props in 3 now. e.g. at a PEI farm the silos, well, logs, and trees are smooth-shaded. The player, zombies, and animals are the only smoothed weighted meshes though, and I suppose that would be lost if the character was blocky.
Stretching the arm could be supported, but the main issue is that the arm rolls 180 degrees which twists the connection to the body. One of the benefits of detaching the shoulder from the body is that there would be no distorted mess there anymore.
.
