Drawbacks to Anime Shading (Patreon)

So, I think we're about 1 month into seriously diving into Anime style shading. And, I'd like to share some of the things I discovered about it:

1st, Anime shading looks best in mid-high poly. Contrary to what I thought originally, this is not a low-poly art style. Technically, you can get away with a mid/low-poly body. But, if you want the hair and face to look right, the face and hair generally have to be fairly high poly. Otherwise you get that "cheap" anime look.

2nd, if you do this art style, you REALLY have to dedicate to it. You have to break a lot of topology rules to get the shadows in the right place. And, you're model is likely ONLY going to look good with the Anime shader on. When you turn the shader off, or try to use any other normal texture technique, your character's aesthetic pretty much falls apart -

Even with add-ons for changing normals. I find that I spend most of my time getting the normals/shading to look just right. Probably spent more time adjusting the normals than I did modeling the character lol.

If I had to be COMPLETELY honest, I'd say I think it's harder to make 3D look like Anime, than it is to make high-res 3D models. Which worries me a bit, because if that is truly the case, I feel like it might be better us (in terms of speed) to just use the League of Legends style toon look, which is all dependent on texture maps, but require zero normal editing.

Still not entirely sure yet, but so far, those are my findings/feelings about this style. I think if you do it right, it looks very good, but that's the catch. IF you do it right - And, doing it right, takes A LOT of work - But what do you guys think?? You can see what things look like so far above -