But Heimerdinger is allowed to remain roiling in his own mechanical uselessness. Any chance you guys could fix your game play issues before your aesthetic ones?

Uselessness is subjective.

I find there are times when a siege pusher is necessary for a team. Perhaps he's no Anivia; but the skill ceiling isn't quite as high.

They arent reworking him visually because he is ugly, they are reworking him visually because he is the wrong type of ugly. They want him to be stronger looking, yet still maintaining the drooling/creepy/grimy look/feel.

Those artists, not remaking champion abilities.

Damn them.

Obama should be making me burgers too.

They've been working on Heimer for a while. The news of the Trundle visual rework is recent. So they are fixing gameplay before aesthetic issues.

/thread

The team working on mechanics and champion design is different to the art team. It's not like...

Jeez. Alright, it isn't like:
Riot currently has 100% resources
Devote 30% resources to X.
Devote 15% resources to Y.
Etc.

It's more like:
Riot teams operational:
- Design
- Champion Design
- Item Design
- Art
- Animation
- Texture Art
- Modeling
Etc.

Different teams, different priorities, different people, different team leaders, different lots of things. They can't just say "we're going to do this, and it'll be ready by this time", because game development doesn't work like a progress bar on a research in an RTS game.

we need awesome, not handsome

Trundle and Karma were said to have visual reworks coming with nothing even resembling a deadline or time frame to accompany this. Do you remember how long Ashe and Soraka's took after being announced? We are probably not going to see either of them for a very long time, and even if we pretended this was going to be the same use of resources that Heimer's rework would take, they haven't said anything to suggest that they're prioritizing the graphical updates over Heimerdinger.

What they did end up prioritizing over Heimer were the season 3 changes, since Xyph took the helm of the item side of things. Once things have stabilized a bit more and season 3 actually launches, Xyph will presumably resume work on his Heimer rework.