I think in general a lot of the female heads wear too much makeup, and especially too much lipstick. I may be biased about that since I never wear any makeup myself, but it makes it harder to find good female faces that I want to use, especially since there are few female faces in the first place. And that's the real problem I think. While we have a plethora of male faces with all sorts of facial features and facial expressions, most of the female faces have very few distinguishing facial features or interesting expressions. It's usually a smile or some sort of shocked/scared/angry face. Although it seems there has been some more interesting ones recently, there's still way more interesting male faces coming out. And in sets, we often get new male faces, and then there's one female thrown in, with a standard smile. Bear in mind that I only care about the yellow heads, so I'm not talking about licensed themes.
As for the hourglass torso print, I actually find that a bit silly, as the torso itself is just as blocky as the male torso, so I think it just looks weird with that print on it. But I can see that it adds more detail in many cases, and it doesn't bother me that much, I just find it silly.
What I really just want is more variety in (yellow) female faces...