I, for one, liked the idea. The point of a challenge is to be challenged. Looking through the assets, I came up with several ideas. As the rules state you can use your own GUI elements and fonts, so the restrictions are more than doable.
There are several rogue-like packs; a couple of racing packs complete with roads, hazards, and vehicles; a mini golf pack complete with flags and golf balls; a pirate ship pack with cannons, ships in different state of damage, island pieces, fortress pieces, explosions, life boats, etc... and many more packs that can be made into a complete game.
As for packs with no characters, not all games require characters, shmups, racing games, space battles, breakout, etc... As for lack of animated assets, the rules do allow modification of the assets, and there are more ways to animate something other than sprite strips and bone animations.