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Cover was accepting male applicants from the beginning but they probably weren't seriously interested in creating a StarsEN for the first year and a half or so, just because there wasn't a clear market for corporate male vtubers. Luxiem proved there was one, which is why the auditions for StarsEN dropped in January 2022. But I think Cover was hasty and didn't quite know what they were looking for, whether they wanted to ape Luxiem's yumejo/fujo pandering or whether they wanted something more palatable to the existing HoloEN audience.
I also think there was some kind of friction between EN management and Cover; the former probably thought that Nijisanji's boom signaled that they were the future of EN corpos and that the boundaries between Tempus and HoloEN needed to be obscured or taken down entirely, whereas Cover wanted to play it safe. The former vision was winning out early on with how they tried to advertise Tempus to HoloEN fans, how many collabs there were early on, and how they tried to hide the Holostars logo from the Tempus website. At some point there was a shift, probably involving omega getting fired and Cover exerting more creative control over "HoloPro EN". I also think it's worth considering why Tempus 2 seems more catered to yumejos than Tempus 1.
