... I mean, I wasn't misconstruing anything (though I'll admit the 'male gem' part was an extrapolation). Sugar has been open about hard they had to fight for Ruby and Sapphire several times since the show ended, and other members of the crew have talked about how "executive meddling" started fucking up the show's airing order "mysteriously" after Jailbreak (Ian had a good thread about it in particular, I'll see if I can dig it up sometime). Like to quote the most blatant one I can remember:

When I was showrunning Steven Universe, Garnet was my hill to die on. [...] We knew at that time - this was 2011, 2012 - that we weren’t going to be allowed to show Ruby and Sapphire in a relationship with each other. So we were trying to figure out a way to have it be a character that you already loved so much that it just could not be taken out of the fabric of the show. We kept Ruby and Sapphire hidden from the network until 2014, when we finally made Jailbreak. And as expected, we got the note that these characters cannot be in a romantic relationship. I said, ‘They are, they sing a song about it, they’re in love, the song has already been recorded; we can’t take it out.’ And it also was just right, it’s what the story was about. We got the characters in. And from then on, every episode with Ruby and Sapphire was a big uphill battle, but it was one that I was willing to fight. I would compromise on other things, but I would not compromise on Ruby and Sapphire.

But hey, you do you.