Decided I really, really want the option to choose shaders

Well, the thing with the 'shaders' is that it isnt just shaders.

Analyzing the content from the demo I can tell that some of the effects in these 'shaders' have been baked into the textures for example.
The watercolour overlay on the characters for example, it is in the original texture. it is not a shader effect.

Thus having an option to switch between styles is not really an option.

That being said, this is the nature of voting systems. If you were not there to cast your vote your voice wont be heard.
And if you are part of the minority... well too bad.
I didnt vote on it either, but personally I do not mind the stylized look.

To me the stylized look give more character to the game. The 'traditional' shaders without the outlines and what not just look really bland to me. Could very well be any other 3d sidescrolling game.
I agree on the colours of the boss though. I dont necessarily think it is an issue with saturation, but more something with the use of colours. (thats why I made a mod for it! Shameless plug: www.bloodstainedfanforums.com/thread/1148/bloodstained-modded )
It looks like they are using all 3 primary colours of this boss, making it feel like a childs toy. (Its pretty much pure blue, with green and red.)

Awesome though highly unlikely I would think. Though I will admit there were some pretty impressive shaders on the roster. :p

We've been over this. Several times, in fact. It's not that simple.

Yeah, one of the other threads we had on this with further insight:

bloodstainedfanforums.com/thread/874/selectable-shaders

They may still come up with something for Miriam's character model itself that can be applied like what Astaroth mentioned, but for the game itself, it's most likely not a viable possibility.

This is honestly the most realistic outlook to have, if you promise too many things it could end up half-baked. 

At the risk of pursuing something that's obviously figured to be a closed case by many, I offer my take.  As previously stated, I feel the cartoony look of the shader is accomplished mostly through two of the shader's features: The cyan lightsourcing, and the "cel shading" black borders.  (A third factor is the cel-like sharp delineation of shadowed surfaces.)  Now, as far as the cyan lightsourcing effect goes, this is indeed baked into the textures in Bloodstained, but only as a separate layer.  In fact I suspect it is simply the alpha layer of all the textures for a given mesh, rather than an entirely separate texture.  Surfaces exhibit the cyan glow when presented obliquely to the camera, but only then:



Tweaking, modifying, reducing or outright disabling this glow is thus a simple matter of changing one variable - the one which dictates the color and transparency (opacity) of this specific effect - and is no more "impossible" than it is for Miriam's boots to have cyan borders on the calves while she runs, yet cyan borders on the sides while she idles.  (See above.)

I can confidently state that the shader in play is identical across Miriam and all NPCs in the demo, including the boss.  As you say, the playfield graphics get a different treatment, and I'd suppose there will be many different ones for different scenarios.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if they choose to tone down the cyan glow on the boss, which often resolves as a ridiculous radioactive paint detail, it can only be an improvement.  And the sad fact of the matter is that any other boss that's similarly large is almost certainly going to exhibit the same exact problem unless things are specifically tweaked to avoid it.

The cyan effect is part of the texture, as you say, but it is not a "permanently on" part - its appearance depends on the angle of the polygons, and this in turn is dictated internally; the entire effect could be completely disabled if desired, without needing to modify any textures or meshes.  To better illustrate what I mean, here is a shot of the boss's tentacle:



These two images were taken about half a second apart.  The cyan effect here is actually constantly flowing along the tentacles, yet nonetheless the only time you can see it at all is on surfaces which are within a certain range of perpendicular to the camera.  Thus you see a lot of the effect with the tentacle pointed roughly at the camera (above), and it almost completely disappears, half a second later, with the tentacle having shifted 90 degrees (below).

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With the cyan glow factor out of the way, it's time to talk more about the black borders.  All this self-assured talk about baked textures doesn't really touch upon the border problem.  I don't think I need to explain how the textures or the meshes, or indeed any other items that takes a major proportion of development time, have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not a given model is being rendered with arbitrary black edges on sharp and/or oblique angles.  That can be disabled on a whim.  Now, I point to the following image as evidence that at least reducing the effect can net a desirable result:



On the left, the original image provided as a "character 3" specimen.  On the right, what we got in the demo.  (Crop, no scaling.)  The borders on the left image are either absent or significantly reduced compared to the right image, and it makes for much cleaner and more appealing graphics, at least in my opinion.  But the focus of the discussion is technically the boss, so let's study what makes the black borders uniquely problematic there.



Really, nothing less than the fact that the black borders are at least twice as thick as even the already thick borders on Miriam.  Depending on the situation, it can get far, far worse:


Is this supposed to be the successor to Castlevania, or to Ōkami?  Shrug.  This needs to be toned down.  A lot.  (Side note: I'm pretty well convinced at this point that the low detail of the boss's mesh has been dictated by the foreknowledge of certain mandated ports.)

The shader in question affects "characters", hence its designation, "character 3". If you drop the cyan glow, the black borders, and the hard shadow delineation, the only thing left to do is tweak color balance and you have "character 1" in the bag (as long as the essentially unimportant normals of a cel shaded model don't actually prove a barrier, assuming they even have any). Perhaps the more convoluted shader considerations are more applicable in the case of "background 1" vs "background 3", but the only thing that seems to be irreversibly baked into the character assets they've produced so far is the unique texture layer on the boss which produces the rolling effect on the cyan glow. Since none of this affects the background and the background does not share any of the qualities which would make it look cartoony, I see no reason to rock that boat.

I actually feel that in this case, even if the black border item ends up being non-negotiable, that won't stop like-minded modders. A simple edit like that would probably be one of the first things out the door.

Well, they have normals. See: how they're doing the black outlines.

It's likely they also need them for the cyan glow - otherwise, how would they know if the polygon is oblique to the camera or not? By calculating the normal in real time? Yes, it can be done, but it's a bit too computationally expensive for something you could just include in the model data.

As for the rest of the shading, "the essentially unimportant normals of a cel shaded model", are exactly that: unimportant to the cell shader. Any shader with any kind of lambertian-like gradation component needs normals, and they're likely missing because the cell shader doesn't need them. The ones that are there are not adjusted to look good on a lambertian shader: they're there to stretch the vertices in the right direction, and to predict if a given triangle is facing the camera or not.

This is assuming there are no other texture layers at work in the original shader templates, layers needed not to know whether the vertices are facing the light source or not (like the normal), but to "tweak" the color balance, as you say.

But anyhow, I think we can agree there are a lot of assumptions here: we'll know more once modders have their hands on the finished product.

Actually the outline is part of the model.

What they are doing to get the effect is copy the model, invert the normals and move the vertices out.
So basically the your are looking at the outline model from the inside out.

As for the 'backlight' effect, this is a shader effect. It is using something called 'Fresnel'. It is not tied to the outline model at all.
This is why it only appears on steep angles from the camera, basically near the edges of the model.
Now I am not sure of this, but I think that they are using a mask texture to mask the intensity out the fresnel effect in certain areas.
For example the armpits don't seem to have this Fresnel effect so much. Basically areas that get occluded dont receive the effect so much. (in fact I think they are using an ambient occlusion texture to mask the effect.)

This cyan fresnel effect would be the easiest effect for the developers to remove. (pretty difficult for modders.)
Modders will be able to remove the outline effect on the model pretty easily, heck I could do it if I wanted to, but I prefer the black outline tbh.
That being said this could take a while for modders as they will have to edit all of the models in the game to remove the outline.
Another option would be to modify the shader of the black outline, but again afaik modifying shaders is pretty difficult if you are modding.

The reason I prefer the outline, is that it makes the area around the character 'darker' thus making the character 'inside of the outline' stand out from the background more. It makes the character pop.