>>3775486> lack of reference material/artistic influencesPlenty of people used fashion or adult magazines for references. You could probably match every Terrie Smith piece to a page number in Playboy or Hustler or something. There was no lack of good artistic material to copy from - it's just that these people largely sucked at art.
The main reasons to that was the fact that very few skilled or even mediocre artists in the 90's would draw furry because it already had a bad rep and the audience was so small and broke you couldn't make any money out of it. That left only the people who had a burning fetish for it, or were too autistic to mind their own lack of skill.