Basically, if it were feasible, someone would probably have already made it.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya by Isao Takahata. The most expensive Japanese film ever.

Well, I'd say you'd be surprised by what you can pull off with a sufficiently solid and detailed facerig or set or blendshapes, just in Blender, which is free to use.

You do have a good point with clothes, thats more complex, but uh, again even in Blender, detailed clothes physics are entirely possible, and its also not too hard to make custom clothes rapidly.

You can do that with VROID + Blender pretty darn fast, and you can throw whatever base model you want into VROID for it to be a sort of digital tailor for, and then export it to Blender.

VROID's tool for this is also free.

Beyond that, there are other freely available plugins for Blender that do or enable the same kind of rapid design and fitting of physics enabled clothes.

Then you just animate skeletons, generate your frames to potentially rotoscope or what not.

Basically, I am saying the tools for this do already exist, and many of them actually are already used in 3D anime, just... to my knowledge, not yet with anything resembling Ukiyo-E.

I'm 100% sure many studios have their own proprietary software and toolsets and pipelines for this.

Capitalism != Free Market.

Arguably, the entire, main problem with capitalism at a basic conceptual level is its natural tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly.

You can also have free markets in many kinds of different social paradigms that differently allocate or control capital than our modern paradigm of essentially 'capitalists get to do whatever they want, everyone else is at the mercy of their whim, and mercy is not profitable'.

You basically always have to have regulation, anti-trust laws, various sorts of mechanisms to actually maintain anything resembling a free and competetive market, in most categories of goods and services.

IE, "Free Markets" can only exist for a short time by essentially random circumstance; to prevent them from stratifying and consolidating, you need some kind of system that exists outside of and around said market, to actually maintain it as a competetive market.

You're not wrong that a good deal of the homogenization effect is just basic marketing, just how appeal works across a population...

... but capitalism overemphasizes this, exaggerates it, as the relentless pursuit of maximum profit, in the short term, changes business strategy toward monopolist rent seeking.

Now, combine that with... well this literally is media we are talking about, so, this directly changes broader social and psychological norms of what is socially acceptable to be expected.

Were the production and distribution of art more distributed, more varied, less highly concentrated into a small number of huge orgs/systems, wasn't gatekept so hard, was easier for smaller players to not get drowned out by bigger players... you woukd find a consumer market closer to a free and competetive market, with more diversity, as it would be easier for studios that take artistic risks to come and go, to exist, to cater to a specific niche or set of niches.

For me, the last one.

You coukd give me the other two and I'd rather try to cure cancer or something like that.