that's because there's roughly 300 separate animations per character, most of which take at least an hour to do one (if you want it to look good). re-colors take about 30 minutes to do, depending on how good you are with photoshop, and you can immediately show it off when done. that, and there's too many people that profess to be good at texturing and very few that say they're good at animating.
and speaking of animations, Camonsters, i can't animate for now. i've been getting a ton of school projects this last week, and i have a few exams next week. i won't have time until the christmas break to do anything. i'd rather tell you now than have you expecting something of me that i haven't done. i'm sure you'll do good though.
and JediKnightTemplar, i do agree that most projects do the easy things first (recolors, CSP's, all the stuff you can do in photoshop), but that's because many hackers are lazy and want to do the easy stuff first. i too get a bit annoyed when a project starts out by showing a character with the recolors and CSP's done, but they only have one or two animations done. but it takes a lot of time and effort to make a full new character, and since many projects are one person working on them, it'll take forever to do, if it ever gets done.
sorry for the random rant, but i know the behind the scenes work of making a character, and having people just walk up and say 'is it done yet?' or 'why is there no progress?' or 'this project is dead'. just because we don't show every bit of everything we do doesn't mean that we're not working on it.
long post is long. i'm going to go eat now.