I think Akira is a man full of pride. He never allowed anyone fix his drawings. In Act 10 and 14, there were 5 people in the staff. And the characters are almost on model, and the head shape is mostly round. And then he got rid of that person, and episode 18, 22 and 26 got worse. It looks to me that he wanted to opposed to Sakou Yukie till the last moment, and nobody could do anything about him.
Or, you know, he just drew close enough to being on-model that nobody bothered to correct his stuff that much. I'm pretty sure animators don't get much of a say in these things.
God, I hate this fandom's irresponsible rumor-mongering.
A few weeks ago there was an art collector on ANN saying Ikuko Itoh hated Sailor Moon because she didn't seem to want to talk about it or seemed interested in her work on it when autographing her art from it (when they were at a panel
dedicated to Princess Tutu.)
What's sad is that there's slightly more ground to that speculation than this because someone actually visited her at a con.
It's fine if you don't like season 3's art. It's
not fine to start dragging a real life person's name through the mud because of it.