Certainly, using Zbrush (If you can afford it) is the best way to avoid critics. Hehe. I personally use Makehuman and Quidam Studio for my characters. I like Quidam Studio more, because it has more features.

I have modeled a base mesh that I can quickly edit to get a more stylized character though, but I could care less about people thinking I am less of an artist for not modeling everything from scratch, especially since I am doing things myself, and mainly trying to learn.

Link to base characters:

http://forum.maratis3d.com/viewtopic.php?id=735

Link to base characters:
http://forum.maratis3d.com/viewtopic.php?id=735

Those are excellent, nice work. I'm big into low-poly modelling at the moment and getting low poly humans that well defined is harder than it looks.

Thanks Aardvajk. Yes, it is difficult to make low-poly models that smooth well while keeping decent topology.

My intent is to make a library of low poly models as bases for starting a model. The human was the hardest one. I need to make one for animals and trees and flowers and houses. I am debating on whether or not to buy the pro version of google sketchup (hopefully it exports to blender with clean topology).

Even when using the Level of Detail modifiers in software, you get strange topology that is hard to edit manually (without sculpting).