Interesting. By non-chibi do you mean realistically proportioned or do you mean less over the top with the stylized big heads and tiny bodies? Because sometimes people just want something more like Alundra than Minish Cap, even though that's still very stylized in proportions compared to something like, I don't know, Balder's Gate I guess. I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of pixel sprited characters with actually realistic proportions. There are some advantages that exaggerated proportions give, especially when working in pixels, so sometimes even when trying for more realistic, it's still good not to abandon those exaggerations entirely.
There is some level of stylization in classic RPGs, true, but as sprites got bigger, the trend was to make the ratios approach more conventional human ones. If you're working with a height of 20 pixels, if you want a discernable face there's a minimum amount of pixels you need to spend on it (Mario's got his iconic mustache as a way to work around the NES's limitations - they didn't have the pixels to define a nose separate from his face without it).
However, despite being much larger than classic RPG sprites, the default-style RMMV characters don't just have heads that are
almost the size of the body; the character sprites are actually
mostly head.
The RMMV side-view battlers have heads that are 60% of the body by height (37 pixels of head, 26 pixels of body), and the ratio on the overworld sprites are even worse (15 pixels of body, 29 pixels of head). If you compare against, say, final fantasy 6 sprites, the RMMV overworld sprites have a body that is 3 pixels longer, and a head that is 18 pixels longer.
Now, in principle the extra-large heads could be used to help differentiate characters, by giving them very different facial profiles and really distinctive looks. In practice, however, the RMMV sprites have heads that are identically shaped, so having a big head doesn't actually help give each character a distinctive look. To go back to final fantasy six again, even with a tiny block of pixels (the faces are about 6x6), the characters have different features. The RMMV sprites, on the other hand use roughly 20x20 blocks for the faces, but each head has the same profile and look.
This is, of course, largely an artifact of having sprites tied to the character generator (and keeping everything compatible and consistent), but the end result is that sprites end up emphasizing the elements that are most identical between characters.
Time fantasy is significantly better than the default style (though personally I'm still not a huge fan of the way all the heads are bean-shaped in profile).
I'm not sure how much of the target audience I am for this survey though, since I'm going with fully-custom assets. On the other hand, the reason I'm doing that is because I couldn't find what I wanted in the asset packs, so *shrug*.
I think the taller MV sprites that the Dark Fantasy had was truly amazing <3 ^_^ It would truly be amazing to see more of those styles, or even a full fleshed MV Generator with the taller sprites as templates <3 
