And dozens of us are playing them. Dozens !

With even that kind of 'character set art', things have got quite advanced, see Caves of Qud or Cogmind, which have a lot of visual flourishes.

Very few of the recent popular ones are if at all

The recent popular ones (edit: assuming I am reading correctly which games you refer to) are all pretty much spinoff genres that borrow heavily from traditional roguelikes, but break from the classic design attributes in very important ways. Many of them are excellent games, but I don't think it's being nitpicky to distinguish them. Note I make this objection without wanting to wade into the tedious war over terminology.

cough dwarf fortress cough

Dwarf Fortress has support for pixel-art tile sets and it's very easy to use them these days. I've played DF for close to a decade and never spent a significant amount of time looking at the base ASCII graphics.