I don't think its particularly fair to compare anything to the best of its genre, but even if you compare RWBY to the most low-effort shitty battle anime it looks bad by comparison. At least those will actually portray the villains as one-dimensional evil mother fuckers instead of do nothings that perpetually fuck up every plan.
I’d say another thing of RWBY is it’s just a mishmash of things. You got things Monty liked and knew (Ruby’s weapon is because Monty just liked sytches, Weiss’s style was because Monty studies fencing, and Adam was based on the quick sword draw fighting style), along with Ruby‘s motivation being your typical Weekly Shonen Jump “I wanna be (insert thing here)!” and Yang looking for her mother is a very bargain bin derivative of Kill la Kill where Ryuko was looking for her father’s killer.
Then you got Beacon which is just your “anime school” except that’s more a place for the characters to sleep more than anything because all we get is a few classes,a bully arc, a food fight, and a dance before it’s destroyed (and then there’s the fact that Beacon seems to not know if it wants to be a high school or a college).
Then, you got things going on “in the shadows” for the mains to investigate or stumble on like a common criminal like Roman Torchwick working with Faunus Extremists in the White Fang and Cinder persuading or intimidating people to work under her while her henchmen kill White Fang deserters in cold blood and help her to infiltrate a school and orchestrate a terrorist attack.
AND THEN, you got Cinder working for this immortal in Salem, who’s opposed to the old mentor in Ozpin, in both a role of henchman and Darth Vader/Palpatine right hand. And the path to find leads and next moves leads to this world spanning adventure for the mains.
FINALLY, you have things like magic, Silver Eyes, and Maidens that accompany if not add to the action aspects like Semblances and Aura.
Put that all together and you get what I like to describe as “shonen anime, JRPGs, and Final Fantasy supplemental material put in a blender”. From the motivations of Weiss and Blake alone, in hindsight RWBY was always trying to be more than “Monty’s excuse to show his fight choreography” or “a small webshow of cute anime girls fighting monsters”. Did nobody in the brain trust find it important to actually develop things further than what they settled on? While Monty dying wasn’t in the cards, did everyone really think Monty would always hit gold when he’d just go off on his own and animate and mo cap things without Miles and Kerry’s knowledge? Did nobody try to get Monty to develop things beyond bullet points and chicken scratch before punting things to Miles and Kerry before going to animating because what he gave was rejected because “your show can’t just be fight scenes.”?
It’s starting to become clear that Monty, Miles, and Kerry (all three of whom could be argued to be warranting of a “Created By” credit) underestimated the work a show like RWBY needed because as time goes on, things seem to come across as very first draft, course correcting, or “Oh shit! We need to do something because we forgot something”. Because it seems like Miles and Kerry either A. Are trying to interpret the roadmap Monty left but things are so vague and underdeveloped that things could mean anything, or B. Miles and Kerry saw what Monty left and went rogue and are continuing to do so. (Personally, I lean towards the former).
