Rigger here, Cover's been hiring Brian for recent models and if they can actually get into his backlog, then it's not a money issue. It either has to do with the artist drawing the model, splitting and layering it which can affect how much a rigger is able to flex and animate it, or they intentionally go for a "less is more" approach with a model, which is a fundamental skill in artwork and animation in general, and applies to Live2D and streaming just as much. Or they just have a hard time finding a quality rigger without a backlog and they need all these models ready for a new gen/costume relay.
"Less is more" isn't about doing less to get things done faster though, it's about assessing how much you should do that will actually be useful, basically trying to avoid feature creep. You'll see from a lot of amateur or even experienced-but-low-sales riggers doing animations for things that aren't going to be used 99.9% of the time in any context, or are just distracting with too many moving parts because they are girls who love sparkly things that constantly bounce and god is it actually irritating in practice. Then you compare with the actual expensive riggers and they simply work on good looking fundamentals, and only putting on the necessary bits and bobs without going too far, and it works out because the vtuber doesn't need more than that to be entertaining.
If you want an example of an "excellent" model, look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSDvZucqmcoYou'll realize however that this model only has so many features to showcase the rigger's ability, and a lot of them are only really usable in recorded video. Watch any of his streams and you'll see he uses pretty much none of them actively. Western streamers have figured out how to get some of these expressions to work based on point redeems and follows, but then you have to consider how much of that is positive for the visual clarity of the stream (real people don't have their arm wave independently from their body, let alone wave whenever someone new follows) or if people only trigger them for novelty.
>>18335564Brian is western and is considered one of the top riggers with high prices to the point that any indie getting a model from him is considered a minor social event in the rigging/twitter scene.
