*unburrows* Most "new" sprites out there are sprite edits, only a handful are made from from scratch, and even then those have a very unique "style" that feels out of place next to sprites from other games. Making sprites from scratch isn't impossible, but making a WHOLE working character from scratch that's a complete different beast, now imagine make everything else? many characters, with many animations, making a simple character edit for Great Dragon took me 2 days, and i couldn't bring myself to make the second step of her idle animation up to this day (for different reasons, but the biggest one being that I'm a sprite editor, not a sprite maker, i feel bad about it).
If you've seen that many I'd love to seem em myself, cuz so far those are far in between among ocean the edited ones.
Another factor in that equation is that not everybody is obsessed with body inflation, and could care less to make a sprite of someone inflating and exploding. (remember, that would require an inflating animation for every character that is in the same game that Kitana would be, be her re-done from scratch or not) and there are over nine thousand other ways to kill someone (and at least half of em are way cooler than kitana's inflatalaty), add that the competent sprite artists are even fewer that share our interests, so it all piles up in the unlikely chance of what you propose.
(WARNING) hxxp://s21.photobucket.com/albums/b269/vahnblack/?action=view¤t=dizzyexpoa.gif (WARNING she explodes) i made this one over 3 years ago, and its one crappy example of a half arsed animation, and it took me quite awhile to do, and i can say that i took the shortcut to finish it too. Making a still sprite of a character is one thing, even tho that frankenripping cuts the job exponentially, it's still a very troublesome thing to do. Only the most driven and passionate of people (or some lucky bastard being paid mad bucks) make good animations, and when it's a softhouse making those games, there's a whole staff of spriters working on those, not just one lone brave guy sitting in front of a computer, with only some noodles and coke to back him up, which is the case of most freelance sprite artists out there.
Again, most sprite artists out there have their own projects, and even fewer are that diligent to carry on their projects to the end, so it's not that strange that there's no remade sprites of such a niche thing... *burrows and starts shooting underground spike-waves on marines*