One thing, here. I fully realize that making whole new textures or models requires a lot of work--I've done enough of it to know. However, changing the color of a texture (thus allowing for different clothing colors, hair colors, skin tones, etc) takes seconds. It's as hard as 30 seconds in Photoshop to change a texture if you have a decent white template and maybe a few minutes to change a color value in a line of code somewhere. (Although, I understand that there may be a genuine bug dealing with the 'shaders,' so that's a solid reason why that part isn't working.) I'm not saying "do it now!" What I am saying is that, to some of us, it's a mystery why that seems to be such a major difficulty. I fully and respectfully believe that these challenges do exist and we, as players, need to respect those challenges and take them seriously, being patient and such.
That said, I would squee over variable hair/skin/cloth color. 
Anything that made characters less generic-looking would be 
.
You already found the reason: there is a bug with the shaders, so hair colour does not show. For all races you can choose different hair colours, and for some even hair styles, faces and tattoos.
For most 'clothing' that exists now, a different colour does not make sense. Plate armor has plate armor color, leather is leather
One other point: even a little time is too much if there is none. Devs spend all the time they can (and more) on this game, they cannot add more time to a day. So it is all about priorities.
