I've been working on adding portraits for my playable coyote man mod, which has been a bit of a slog since it needs more work to tweak the human face graphics than the creature graphics required. There's still something off and uncanny about them too so I need another pass on it.
Anyway I'm very glad for the new palette system, but holy crap there has to be a better way to specify the palettes than how it works now. We don't have to duplicate the graphics 10 times anymore, but the config file is still thousands and thousands of lines long, repeating the same stuff over and over except for a color tag.
I also found something that's debatably a bug, or just a missing feature, but it doesn't appear to be possible for a mod to replace vanilla creature portraits. You can replace the creature graphics using the same creature name if you cut and replace the creature, but for some reason this doesn't work for portraits. It'll keep using the vanilla portraits, with no error in the logs. Deleting the vanilla creature portrait config fixed it, but that's not a valid solution for a mod.
I think the only solution is to cut a creature and replace it with a new identifier. But then you get error spam from the vanilla raws trying to add graphics for the cut creature.