Personally, I don't like simon belmont with pink long hair and no pants. I also didn't like the design of CV4 at all. So that Simon was out of the question.
CV ll Simon has none of those.
he has long blond hair,(or black, on the sprite) and black pants. Also looks nothing like CV4 Simon.
I also have to agree just recoloring Richter's sprite is a pretty cheap move. maybe if you modified the Richter sprite a bit more to resemble CV 2 Simon, it wouldnt be as bad.
I also agree with Uzo on the sizes. It looks very bad having large sprites on an environment the size of the small NES sprites