You can see in the screenshot that I was trying to mark remote admins with the green background, tomorrow I can see about making this a playable test if that would help.

This would be a much easier discussion to have if these people came here and said these things in their own words, but also, this is a false dilemma. There are an infinite number of possible designs besides eyes and an 'S.' I strongly doubt that the best possible design to indicate anything is a capital S (especially when we want to move away from being English-specific) or an asterisk. These are choices BlurredD made because reusing existing font sprites was his only option, but we don't have that limitation anymore.

So if there are people who don't like one sprite or another, but do prefer a different sprite, it would be so much more helpful if they could say what they like about one sprite and what they don't like about a different sprite. Falling back to 'S' or '*' is not great, we want something that new players can look at and actually understand, but for that, we need people to actually say what their feelings are.

Sure, everything's possible, but every option makes the the code is harder to maintain and it would be much more satisfying and much better game design to just have the right solution for everyone.

Like, there are a whole bunch of different possible layouts for the player list, and some of them we just don't bother with. We could put the roasts on the left side of the player name, and the deaths on the right side. But we don't, and we don't even make that a toggleable option, because it's so intuitive that would be bad.

In the current design, having player icons like skulls and flags and brains in a consistent horizontal location is much more intuitive: you can easily find the icon, and then you know exactly where to look to find the name from there. It's slower if they're attached to a bunch of jagged, variable-width player names which you have to scan individually. Again, it's also a problem with long names and/or wide icons: the old design would look pretty bad when playing Condemned or Gold Rush.

The issue you identified in your opening post, that there's too much horizontal space between the right edge of the icon and the left edge of the name, is valid, but also solvable.

And also, keep in mind, this is more toggleable than it used to be! BlurredD added the gold asterisk to JJ2+, and you couldn't do anything about it. Now you can replace any icon you want with any other sprite you want, including a capital S or an asterisk if you're really attached to them. You can use jjPLAYER::iconSet or save over the frames in PLUS_PLAYERSTATEICONS.