Incidently, I totally disagree with that. It's a space sim, there is no need whatsoever for your character to run around in a space station. All the action is supposed to happen in space, the docks are just the maintenance stops in between. Making it possible to run around in them would be akin to allowing the player to exit the car and walk around during a pit stop in a racing game ...
In fact, you could (and had to) leave your space craft in E&B, and I thought that was incredibly annoying. My computer had to load a whole new level, and the developers had to either misuse a space graphics engine for indoor graphics or optimise it for indoor graphics that don't enhance gameplay in any way. Note that you didn't really do anything in the space stations. All it did was that you, instead of clicking on a market button (3 seconds), had to walk to a merchant (30 seconds). I didn't notice any PC-PC interaction happening on the space stations, either, and why would there be, really.
I think the avatar system of EVE is pretty good, in its way. People say that you never see the face you create in the beginning, well that's simply not true. It's attached to your character, a smaller version, at least. You see other characters faces quite often, in fact. However, I agree there should be more point to them - maybe they ought to be prominent in PC to PC interaction, and maybe there should be visual changes to the avatars depending on your gameplay decoration (scars, medals, etc).
And, of course, in a space game, the place to personalize is not the comparably irrelevant character, but rather the space ship. I haven't seen much happening in that direction, probably because it's a fine line to tread.
Sidenote: Only a few weeks till Escape Velocity: Nova is released for PC, woohoo.