In my opinion the artist makes the characters loosing some of their charm, they had in their older pictures.

they started to lose their charm in Kai

now they are overusing the chars

naku koro ni > Kai

Also its getting annoying D:

Uh what? that doesn't make any sense.

The art in Kai was a lot better than the art in the first season. However this picture is pretty bad. Just look at the size of their hands compared to the size of their heads.

Oldstuff Vs Newstuff the eternal battle, the story was the important thing with higurashi. Another example of story over art is the early Initial D work, didnt stop it from topping charts all over the world.