[Klashikari]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

JC Staff is a classic "Factory"-style studio. Those types of studios generally don't put out shows with eye-catching animation quality. And yet, Railgun S has it, and consistently so.

This is a clear indication of popularity and profitable aspect of a specific franchise than anything else. Depending of the budget allocated by producers, a given studio can dish out a very different result.
For instance, Madhouse is usually a pretty good studio in term of animation/sakuga, you can have hectic result like... Chaos;Head, which was arguably a far less popular material than other adaptations they have done thus far.

But in any event, it seems like we have more big sellers now than we used to. Whatever you want to chalk that up to, it's good for the anime industry.

I should probably try checking BD sales data of the past years, but from my perspective, it isn't like there are more big sellers, but rather big sellers are more noticeable as most series are gutted barely around the manabi line or even below that point.

I agree that anime has shifted more towards LN/VN/Games, leaving less anime for manga by extension. But this in and of itself does not indicate that anime is in decline, or isn't strong. At least not unless LN/VN/Games are themselves in decline, which doesn't appear to be the case.

I wanted to point out that by making such choices, producers are actually selecting favorable source material for profit (well, not like it was a charity business to begin with).
At this point, anime are more or less dictated by other media, namely LN, than really being a medium on its own.
Of course, you have uccessful anime original series times to times, but this adaptation trend is really saturating the market with the same ol' formula.

I honestly find it very odd to think that the anime industry is in decline when its producing a huge quantity of content. When companies are suffering financial decline, don't they usually cut back on production?

That's exactly what's going on: you have far less 2 cour series nowadays than before. In fact, save perhaps expected hits like Shingeki no Kyojin, we are stuck with tons of 1 cour series.
The same can be said by the number of inconsistent animation being more apparent this day than before.

What's even more evident of the marketing intent is actually the sponsors shown during some series. If you had the chance to see them (since a lot of subs cut these), you would realize that Goodsmile Company, Bushiroad etc are being more and more present in the producers ad, which is a huge giveaway that producers are more prone to gain profit from goods and all instead of BD alone.

Ever since the boom of 2006-2007, you have a major increase of timed release for many goods, figures and all. Of course, I don't pretend it wasn't the case before, but that trend becomes more... "aggressive" should I say.

Either anime studios are downright suicidal and are throwing good money after bad like they're the US Federal Reserve, or things are actually going pretty well right now for the anime industry.

More like producers are now using the anime as a "profitable" means to take on a potential market for their licences.
Let's take an example: Danganronpa is obviously a subpar adaptation based on the fact the series is trying to squeeze 20-30h of reading into 13 mere episodes. What you can see however is that the series is "weirdly" associated with quite many events and goods, as well as the remake being released like only 1-2 month after the anime ends.
A lot of series nowadays work as an investment for the original source material.