Can't you just apportion each artist to a different task? Like, artist1 on environment and associated sprites, artist2 on h-animations and player/enemy sprites? Even if you can still sense the difference in art styles (as you are likely a more accomplished artist than I; for reference, see my first post with a picture), I doubt most people would be able to.
There's definitely something to be said for the gameplay's role in the function describing how 'hot' a game is.
For example, Dark Star, that game that popped up a few days ago on these forums, had superb animations but very mushy and bland gameplay. Because of that, I looked at the animations a few times and that was that.
Another example, Parasite in city, had pretty interesting gameplay -- not enough for me to go back and play it, mind you. However, I've noticed that if I look at the "Omake" (gallery? shrug) thing, the animations just don't do it for me. Same with gif versions of the animations. I much more enjoy putting on infinite bullets and 'easy mode' (but normal HP rules) and wandering into stage 1 and then watching the flies go at her.
As much as I hate to admit it, there IS a psychological component to these games. If we just wanted to see sprites fucking, we could do so on google and be done with it. But we don't. There has to be some kind of framework around the sex content to imbue value onto the characters. The reason h-GAMES are popular is because, even if watching sprites fucking isn't that interesting to most people, there are a LOT of people who are aroused by the psychological shennanigans that go on when you try to empathize with or just imagine that the character is being attacked or whatever else.
I agree with Vinceras. I wouldn't have a year ago, but now I do: gameplay has to be somewhere around equal to the h-content in order to get that compounding effect where the h-content just seems hotter than stuff like Dark Star.
EDIT: I'm a nerd for sexology (
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, it just has a hilarious-sounding name), so I want to add this real quick. What I talked about in the above paragraphs, is the reason why porn movies continually use those shitty, half-assed "storylines" where the girl can't pay the pizza man, or the sister walks in on the brother tugging it or whatever. The point is, even if it's cheesy, the people who want to get into the mindset that they 'know' the characters now have the option to put in the extra effort to get into the cheesy storyline. It just has to be THERE, shitty or not.