Yes, I remember there being objections about Machine lemmings on namida's part. Indeed, I just shared the modified version here as an optional "mod" for any player who likes to use them.
Of course, we can put them into nessy_machine - that would probably not be a style of its own, though, I guess? Since we're trying to avoid duplicate terrain pieces etc., and Nessy wasn't the one who created the graphic set either. So it would be a style that only contains a "lemmings" folder, plus a "theme" file.
My Egyptian lemmings fall into a similar category: They are not a contribution to another user's style, but they're a modification of what L2 Egyptian lemmings would actually look like.
I'm fine with the official, download-included sprites for L2 Egyptian being the L2 recoloured ones, and then my sprites will remain available in this thread for anyone who wants to swap them out. Everyone who wishes to do so, including me, will probably have to re-download or re-extract my Egyptian lemmings again after every update, though, because of course, if you just unpack the entire styles folder, the Egyptian lemmings will be overwritten every time.
But I'm used to doing that from the Magic Set Editor - a software created for designing custom Magic: The Gathering card sets. One template added an extra colour (Purple), and at some point in time the community swapped out the card frame and mana symbols for that. I always preferred the old ones, so I had them as a backup, and then had to re-insert them into their respective folders after every update.
Based on that experience, though, I'd like to keep as many alternatives available for players to choose based on individual taste. Not like "one is the official thing that eveyone is encouraged to use, and the other thing is the somewhat 'illegal' variation that maybe some random guy still has on his computer, so you have to ask that specific person to get it" etc.
Since this is merely about aesthetics and replacing image files, a player using different sprites for their individual play experience shouldn't mechanically affect any levels they build or play, as long as the way the sprites are named is consistent.It's basically no difference to people who use the custom edits of the ONML tilesets (I've seen the slightly "soft-edged" versions of both Brick and Bubble in YouTube Let's Plays several times now).
So, how do we go about this? Do we agree on simply calling this "nessy_machine" and making it a separate "style" that only includes lemmings sprites, rather than any actual terrain or objects?