Too much work for one sketch?

[olvenslife.livejournal.com]

Hello everybody! :)

I'd like to know your views on one thing that recently happened to me.
I accepted a commission from certain person (let's call him Mr. X, I wouldn't like to mention his name because he actually made nothing bad), we agreed on the price, the way it should be done. He wanted to have his own character redesigned and gave me some info on it, lots of descriptions. He told me he wants to have the character done precisely this way. The result of all this had to be a simple pencil drawing - some sort of character reference sheet. I told him if this is going to be complex then it'll be expensive because of many sketches which have to be made. He replied that I should pay full attention to what he's sending me. He said the bigger attention I'm paying to him, the less sketches I'd have to do.
I started working on the character design. Every time I made a sketch he send me a massive comment on it (2 pages of text) which made me terribly depressed. O.@ One time he didn't like the length of hair, second time it was the body... I had to refuse the commission because it wasn't worth the time. I advised him to ask one other artist, the one to whose art he was refering all the time.

What do you think about it? What would you do in this situation?
I'm really not happy with having to refuse it but I saw no other way. :P I lost a lot of time by carefully reading those tons of text and thinking of how to draw it so Mr. X would be actually satisfied.