I don't know where this is headed, and no matter how I search my feelings, I find that I just don't care.

That was more my impression, but I don't follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn't sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It's just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it's sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

Well, at least Kaede is in the loop now - Kouhei isn't the only one who realizes that this could be something more.

O...kay?

Whether it's lopping off villains' heads or slipping out of bed without waking the kids, Grey's the man.

Yura's awesome - I hope she becomes a regular.

Sometimes it seems that Sanda's character growth is actually negative - that he's just gotten more stupid and childish over time.

Pshew.

The Taira chapters are always hard for me to read - I know the circle in which he's trapped all too well.

...the company’s efforts appear to be yielding results, as evidenced by the successful takedowns and ongoing legal actions against major piracy sites.

I just wonder who they're trying to convince here.

There have been piracy sites on the internet pretty much from day one.

And the biggest ones have gotten taken down pretty much from day two.

And new ones keep popping up.

I didn't know that the author of that godawful trainwreck even had another series.

I was curious to see if he could actually write something good, so I looked it up, then tracked it down and read the first dozen chapters or so, and I'd say the answer is no.

Well - it is better than Rent a Girlfriend, but only insofar as it couldn't possibly be worse.

The basic setup is seven siblings - two boys and five girls (five girls - where have I seen that before?) - who are suddenly told by their fabulously wealthy and conveniently absent father that they're not actually blood related.

The mc is the eldest son, who's actually the middle child. The other son is virtually non-existent, which is necessary because he actually knows how to talk to girls and actually does it, so if he was interacting with the sisters at all, the story would instantly turn into NTR, since the mc is predictably pathetic and the bulk of every chapter, just like Rent a Girlfriend, is his endlessly droning thought stream of insecurity, confusion, doubting and second-guessing. He's marginally better than Kazuya, but that's not really an accomplishment.

The girls are decidedly better than any of the ones in RaG, but again - they couldn't hardly be worse. They're really just animated tropes though - the teasingly provocative oldest sister, the emotionlessly provocative meganekko, the twin-tailed tsundere, the cute sporty girl and the painfully shy but secretly aggressive youngest.

And... that seems to be about it.

When I got bored with it, I skipped forward to the latest chapter (27), which is one of the sisters basically overtly confessing to him then kissing him, believing that he's asleep, which of course then leads to him revealing, after she leaves, that he's been awake the whole time. And what does he do? He shout/thinks to himself, "What the hell was that?!"

It's probably safe to assume that if this goes 300 chapters, that's what he'll still be doing.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it's essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There's no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they're right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.