A figurado is not a straight tube. The head or the foot (or both) is shaped: torpedo, pyramid, belicoso, perfecto, double corona with a pigtail, and the rest of the fancy-tail family. Cuban factories treated some of these as ordinary sizes. After the revolution the skill thinned out in the U.S. market until houses such as Arturo Fuente put figurados back on American shelves with the Hemingway line in 1981.
They are harder to bunch and harder to roll. The point of a torpedo concentrates the wrapper at the head; a perfecto closes both ends. None of that is automatic proof of a better cigar. It is a construction choice.
The opposite word is parejo: parallel sides, open foot, rounded head.