Hmm I wonder... Well I guess I'll put out the Footkerchief bait... but this question is driving me nuts
Toady do the sponsorship animals means that soon we will have giant and person versions of all the animals currently in the game? Are we that far from a Monarch Butterflyman?
I don't have an answer for that. I do personally have mixed feelings about the inclusion of giant/person versions of every new animal, but I guess it mostly stems from the fact that it takes actual work (and semi-duplicated raws, which can have errors). If giant/person variants were created procedurally I wouldn't care.
Yeah I have to agree with Foot on this. In my mind at least it seems like it would be simpler to do it procedurally... although I know firsthand that there are some pretty major stumblng blocks with that, namely that many animals have very un-human shapes, and forcing them to be humanoid without killing the flavour is pretty hard. I fiddled a bit with moose-men and the nitemare of hoof-based nonsense was quite awful.
I am also a bit concerned that they might all get replaced next time Toady decides to take a look at procedral creature generation. Right now we have FBs and Titans, but they tend to kind of suck. Obviously at some far-flung point of the future this is planned to be fixed up and made more robust, and I can easily imagine that part of such a framework would allow some nifty giant/person variants. Not to mention other variations as well, like "giant evil badger" or "gelatenous cave crocodile" or "mechanical aardvark" or whatever, and generally it is a good idea to just bring all that under the same umbrella when the time isright, rather than working very hard on wat will probably end up a placeholder (or at least that's the general approach the Toad seems to take with just about everything else).
TLDR: Toady spending time on making the variants seems out of character, because they are probably going to end up a placeholder.