I think the interesting thing about Doug is that he's a lot closer to the type of cow that early more innocent Chris Chan was before everybody dug up all of the horrible shit and the years of trash trolling and a-logs broke him far worse than Barb ever did. Though even at his most innocent Chris was still far worse than Doug.
Something very important to remember is that being a lolcow doesn't actually require you to be a horrible person or to have skeletons in your closet really. It just requires you to be something that can be milked. Doug is not something that you milk directly, it is more that he creates an atmosphere around him that can be milked. We are so used to every cow being drug addled, a rapist, alcoholic, egotistical to the point of absurdity, obsessed with constant internet drama and posting, plugged into social media 24/7, and/or tangled in lawsuits that someone that isn't completely over the top fails to even register against them anymore. There's been a few times I've looked at sneedchat and people have argued that certain horrorcows shouldn't have the tag because they aren't that bad by modern standards and when I check the threads I don't even get past the OP just because I don't want to have to read about yet another rapist or child groomer. We have stared into the abyss so long that we are starting to just get desensitized to it all.
Doug also used to actually have some real drama around him that he was the epicenter of. We are going way back before the big expose on him too. I think a lot of people forget that early on his ego did go to his head, but we were not in a culture of constant social media. My first exposure to Doug was hearing how somebody met some internet guy they really liked and it turned out he was a complete asshole in person. And then I looked into him and I found a few other weird parts of the internet talking about how he was just an asshole in person. Yet he's always being very good at managing his internet behavior. There used to be a lot of weird bits of drama that would leak out of TGWTG in a minor way if you paid attention to forums back in the day. Then there's the fact that any drama from when those people were still together still somehow involved him, simply because he was the boss. So in a way the main thing that makes Doug seem so much less like a cow is that he was part of a herd of cows that he's no longer really a part of so we don't see the behavior being brought out of him anymore, and even then he was never the worst of the batch. This thread really mostly represents the fact that he was the center of a herd of lolcows, but he was never the biggest.
Though I think something I want to point out is I have this sneaking suspicion that of all of the people from TGWTG he's the one that is actually had the most professional success. Internet influencer is a job now. Youtuber is a job now. It's a real boomer take to not look at people who are making their money and paying their bills off of internet content as anything other than a professional. Some of them have certainly attempted career changes, but that's it. Is that really success in a career if you changed careers? When I look at most of the other TGWTG people from back in the day I'm not really seeing much signs of success in their careers from a financial standpoint, nor am I really seeing signs of them having successes in life beyond the financial. Most of them seem to be miserable people who are dependent upon another person to support them financially or who seem to be making most of their money off of ancient patreon subscriptions without any sign of growth there. Doug is really the only one who found success in the internet thing. As cringe as it is, he headed up the most successful projects even if they are just a little short films released onto the internet, both in terms of viewership and potential revenue earned as well as in absolute quantity of projects.
I'm pretty sure if you could get Doug to sit down and do the work with someone to help with the accounting and budget and to make up for certain skill gaps he's going to naturally have he could probably make something that would do well in a film festival. I don't think any of his peers could do that. It wouldn't be an amazing thing to sit and watch, but it wouldn't be the worst thing at the festival. Doug has too many years of experience and too much basic knowledge to be the worst showing at a film festival. Because I've seen some real awful stuff at film festivals, and even Doug's worst little skits would still put him at about the middle of the indie film pack. The real issue is that Doug just has some really shit takes because he's very surface level in his critique.
TL;DR: I think a lot of the reason people don't see Doug as a cow is because we are desensitized at this point and used to far worse to the point where the dredges of humanity aren't even considered horrific anymore on this forum by some. He still used to have a lot of drama around him, and the main thing that seems to have protected him over the years is an awareness not to air his dirty laundry on the internet. He also was never a particularly large cow himself but was instead the center of a group of cows. And also, despite what some people would think, he probably has had the most success out of everyone from the TGWTG since the rest of them are doing just horrible in life.
