Thank you for writing much of my response for me. This is exactly the point - Kodomo no Jikan, if it were a high school or college age series with the same pace, would still suffer from a fanservice first minRABet in a big way. Any of the loli titles we stuck on that list would in fact still suffer from that if you aged the characters up. Actually, I might be able to at least up my suspension of disbelief a little in the case of Kodomo no Jikan, as I can buy a high school student making a pass at a teacher without previous sexual trauma much more than with a elementary school student. Even then, that still doesn't get around how the show is directed - service over plot/character. I don't really make that clear enough in the blog post either. Solid doesn't mean to me, without fault or good, it means, not glaringly problematic. However, you corabine not glaringly problematic with other elements that jar the viewer out of buying into the show, and well, you get bad.
Does the lolicon element play into their lack of marketability in a country like the US? Yes. Should it? Not if the show is otherwise well written and well directed with good characterization, and the US success of series like Gunslinger Girl shows you can transcend your roots/visuals here. Does the fact that the show we listed are paced/directed poorly because of a difficult-to-market element make them very poor choices for a US company to sink time and money into? I'd love for you explain why not, and not just with "controversy will sell it" because anime was marketed with that mind set for years, and it took getting out of that and marketing it as accessible content for it to explode in the US. To put it another way, we don't need to go back to the days when anime was marketed as "cartoons with blood and boobs." Anime had that market on lock since 1990, but if we don't want to go back a 1990-size industry, the focus has gotta be on getting wider-audience series.
Also, a split release for a niche title is a sure fire way to make no money on it, especially these days. In the case of niche titles, the DVD/Bluray release has to be uncut since that's a sale to the hardcore otaku most of the time. That's why Funi's doing Strike Witches uncut on DVD - it may have been a cheap pick up, but they need the hardcore fans to buy first and foremost since it's not going to pick up much audience beyond that. The edit might have a place for streaming (I'd say broadcast, but I doubt for example Funi will even run Strike Witches on their own linear/on-demand platform,) but nowhere does it have a place on DVD. The failure of edit versions for vastly more mass-market titles (like Inuyasha, Cardcaptor Sakura, Tenchi Muyo, etc,) is proof enough that you can't split release and make more money, and that was in a much more vibrant market than exists today. Either the niche is big enough you can sell the 5,000 (often more like 15,000+) copies you need to get into the black, or you don't. If it really seems like a company wouldn't move that volume, a company shouldn't buy that title.
