>The 97 spaceworld demo/beta of gold and silver had most Pokemon with full body backsprites rather than the mostly just top half/head backsprtes with ended up with in gold/silver

Why do we think this was the case? They look much better with full body backsprites.

And yes, Gold/Silver were at this point just known as 'Pokemon2' and was supposed to be a full sequel to Red/Blue, hence why at this stage the game looks more like a Red/Blue 1.5 rather than a different game