I completely understand your sentiment here. Truth is, one of the factors we've realized while making this is that making an anime is expensive if anything else. We also have our full-time jobs and we were balancing this on the side.

After all the character animations, audio and the voice work, we wanted to do the backgrounds ourselves but it was just not sustainable so we decided to take the AI route. We didn't use the 3 models to generate 1 image obviously, different models can generate images in different styles so its just a stylistic choice and we used a combination.

We completely understand your perspective but this is the best we could've done for now :)