I’d say that animation has always had an issue in the US about having never been taken seriously as art and thus never really been funded well, outside of rare exceptions. The people currently working in the industry are working with in the constraints of what is available, and a lot of them do a pretty good job with in those constraints.
I don’t think that returning to purely hand drawn works is realistic or practical given the realities of the industry, nor necessarily desirable even with better budgets. The digital tools available certainly need to be better developed, and there are a lot of techniques that could be implemented to make better uses of the available budgets.
I’d say that animation has always had an issue in the US about having never been taken seriously as art and thus never really been funded well, outside of rare exceptions. The people currently working in the industry are working with in the constraints of what is available, and a lot of them do a pretty good job with in those constraints.
I don’t think that returning to purely hand drawn works is realistic or practical given the realities of the industry, nor necessarily desirable even with better budgets. The digital tools available certainly need to be better developed, and there are a lot of techniques that could be implemented to make better uses of the available budgets.