How would it be creating new limitations?
Isn't it obvious? The statement was, "Well, there are now animated templates for the first Doctor, Vicki, Stephen and Dod, plus the second, Ben, Polly and Jamie. All helps. Wheel in Space and Space Pirates need a Zoe, as I doubt they can just get the Cosgrove Hall one." The underlying assumption is that the animators cannot create animation of a character
without access to an existing digital template they can load into a computer and manipulate. That is obviously more limiting than just grabbing a pencil and paper and drawing whatever you want to draw freehand.
I don't think many animated productions have been entirely drawn freehand for a very long time, but I'm no expert.
I think that real 2D animation, as opposed to cel-shaded 3D like
The Dragon Prince or this low-budget, low-quality Flash animation the Who reconstructions use, is still largely drawn freehand, except that the drawing is done on a computer tablet instead of a piece of paper. Even 3D-animated shows still use freehand sketches for the early stages of character design, storyboards, and such. The end credits of the 3D-animated shows
The Dragon Prince (cel-shaded) and Hulu's
Dreamworks Dragons: The Nine Realms (not cel-shaded) both feature hand-drawn 2D sketches of characters, items, and scenes featured in the episodes; I often think they look better and have more character and expressiveness than the final 3D.
Maybe it means they don't have to redraw Frazer Hines' face from scratch every time they start a project.
Well, obviously in traditional animation, they had to redraw a character's face thousands of times over, except in limited animation where they just do lip and eye movements over a static image of the face. Is it more work? Yes. But it also allows greater versatility, since you aren't limited to a finite range of models. Life is full of tradeoffs.
Of course, the ideal situation in that case would be to have
both digital models that are relatively easy to animate
and the necessary time and budget to create as many new models as you want, including costume changes. The problem is that many shows don't have the time and budget, so they're stuck with a limited range of models and that inhibits what they can achieve. So you get situations like the "Macra Terror" reconstruction where they had to cut out the refreshment-center scene because it required costume and hairstyle changes their models wouldn't allow. Or
Star Wars Resistance, where the characters hardly ever changed their attire and the female lead was sometimes absurdly shown lounging on her bed in her full flight suit, minus only the helmet. Or
Dreamworks Dragons: Race to the Edge where they only had a couple of character models they reused for all of the background dragon-hunter villains in the later seasons, so that it seemed like they were battling a clone army. You can tell a 3D show has a good budget when its characters change their costumes or appearance relatively often, e.g. in
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Granted, this could sometimes happen in the days of traditional animation as well, for instance in
Star Trek: The Animated Series, where the characters went through the entire series with virtually no costume changes, which is why they used "force field belts" instead of proper spacesuits, so that they could just superimpose a belt and a yellow outline over the stock cels of the characters. Even in "Yesteryear," when Spock wore Vulcan desert robes, he clearly had his Starfleet uniform on underneath them. The Who reconstructions are a throwback to those days of very, very limited animation, which hardly makes them ideal. Their quality is low even compared to the average moderately-budgeted animated TV show in the US.
