What is your "Renders (including animations)" number indicative of? Going by the mpa71 Big Table if you're just adding the number of animations on to the number of renders, Episode 10 would only have ~6200, but the graph looks like over 6500, so I'm having a hard time understanding what that means? Obviously animations and renders aren't 1:1 so I'd understand if you didn't just add it on, but I don't really get where the number comes from otherwise.
Regardless, I don't think that the graph really shows that the newer episodes are "very proportional". They fit the trend if you include them in the trend (thereby weighing the trend more towards themselves), but if you created a trend line from Episode 2 to Episode 7 or even Episode 8, that line would be quite a bit lower than the plotpoints for Episodes 9 and 10. Even moreso if you just did the trend line for Season 2; look how flat that trend is between Episodes 4, 5, 6, and 7. This shows that DPC was on a faster pace in the episodes before Season 3.
I don't like including animations or giving DPC credit for having 25 minutes of animations vs past episodes where he has less than 10 anyway because oftentimes all that contributes to the project is a 30 second Halloween animation that could have been 10 renders. Or a Zoey running animation that could have been 3 renders. If I am gonna include animations, I think doing it the mpa71 way of counting seconds of animations is the best way, and if you look at that, once again, Episode 7 and 8 have some of the highest ratios of seconds Animated in the end product vs development time. Including animations can explain why its taking longer, but it doesn't explain why there's such a hyperfocus on animations if they're taking so long for so little payoff.
And keep in mind that Episode 11 (and part of Episode 10) is using tech that is supposed to be MULTITUDES better than what he used to have.
I think Episode 7 is the Gold Standard for what DPC can do if he has his priorities straight, and even Episode 8 starts to show a trend of favoring animations and unsurprisingly having a worse ratio of development time vs material gains than the Episode before it.
