They stay in a little art circle and never experiment outside. Happens to beginners like it happens to professionals, especially in the american animation industry. It's art incest.
Ie Cartoon Network at this moment and their refusal to let anyone outside of their little shit circle in.
Yeah, the gems are aliens who don't reproduce sexually under normal circumstances iirc so it actually makes less sense for them to have boobs/etc than for them to lack them. I always kinda assumed the gems were inspired by the Nameks in DBZ where they're all masculine looking and referred to as male but technically are sexless and reproduce asexually. Especially since Rebecca Sugar is pretty open about being a giant weeb.
If they were going to go the whole asexual/genderless ideal, why the fuck are they all voiced by women and still basically look like women, no matter how blocky, at the end of the day. At the end of the day, the gems ARE women. A nice majority of them being bland and ugly designed but they're women. Garnets giant ass, Rose's badly drawn massive tits and the clothing designs ect.
That doesn't really scream 'they don't adhere to sex/gender roles' to me but rather just making it easier for them to ship everyone for their perfect yuri story. I told someone if they wanted to create a show with perfect 'genderless' aliens they would mix things up. Get rid of ANY identifiers of the gems having gender and having MEN AND WOMEN voice them (have they have men voice them? I gave up on the shit show months ago) that way it creates the idea that the gems are humanoid and have certain things that humans could line up with they still aren't human and don't reproduce/have genders. Why not have a male looking gem fall for a male on Earth with the earthling being confused because he doesn't know how to react and due to massive difference between how things work between Earth and Gem World it shows how difficult it could be for Gems/Humans to fall in love and makes it more of a point to how special Greg and Rose's relationship was. I can't take anyone seriously when they scream the gems have no gender yet they are decked out in super feminine shit all the god damn time. What the fuck?
As it is, it IS just Planet Lesbian Rocks not Genderless Gems. They could have EASILY mixed things up and made things more interesting but like I said before, it honestly feels like they make shit up during during story-boarding and so all the rules they established in the past are often fucked over because it feels like they constantly revamp things to make it convenient for whatever story or lesson they are making.
This is why I often say SU is only 'adored' due to the idea of the rocks fucking each other because the art, character motivation, pacing, and dialogue all fucking suck. If you remove the romantic elements from this series what does it have? You can't tall it an action series because there is hardly any action and whatever fights they do have are often only seconds long. Sci-Fi? They spend most of the time talking about random things vs actually going far into the lore of gemworld with the gemworld shit taking a backseat to the forced lesson. At the end of the day, SU isn't the grand show people make claims for it. It has cliche characters, bad writing, inconsistent art and a lore that it can't even follow on it's own.
For the same reason anime was everywhere in the early 2000s on Deviant Art more or less. It evolved from an easily recognizable style that's seen on a lot of the currently airing shows so even when it's not fan-art there's a better chance of catching people's eye since it reminds them of other shows.
However a big difference is that while anime could have wonky-ass anatomy, it required a little more skill to look nice through having either nice coloring or passable line work in order to pull off and get a staying audience. The current breed of Cal Arts clones (for lack of a better term) is a lot easier to half-ass between the simple shapes for bodies, sausage limbs, and actual staff members for these shows (the Crewniverse, for one) who post their sticky note scribbles on their Tumblrs and Twitter giving them the impression that any shitty napkin drawing is portfolio-worthy.
It doesn't help that certain studios are enabling this by actually ALLOWING this shit tire work to be passable in the first place and/or only hiring people who can emulate it. How much do you want to be a majority of the people on the CN payroll now were only hired due to being able to copy/having a similar style and being friends (ie, sucking dick) and holding similar political views to those at the higher up. Reminds me of the Schmorky thing a while back and how his ex talked about how CN was just Tumblr in real life with people tripping over themselves to obey pronouns and shit and not getting anything worth a damn done.