Aye, AoT production has always been a mess. I'd imagine S2 episodes 1-7 benefit from the better AoT production schedules but even that season got rough afterward.
I just can't believe they can sustain this level of stressful production. I mean, maybe the other anime productions of WIT aren't quite as bad but I doubt it.
Why do the studio heads agree to take on so many productions? Is it as simple of an answer that they're just about always in financially dire straights?
I think there is concern from individual studio leaders about not being able to get enough work to keep the lights on, hence
this statement from J.C. Staff producer Yuji Matsukura: "However, both me and [BONES president] Minami-san know the situation when there's no work offers coming from the industry. Therefore, there's a fear of having no work for your staff." (Of course, Minami points out immediately afterwards that they're currently in the opposite situation.)
But as important as the workload of an individual studio is to production health, there are other factors at play too. The biggest problem, I think, is that there are not enough capable animators working in the industry to cover the needs of the large output of anime being made. (This has resulted in heavier recruitment of international animators through the Internet to help compensate in resource-strapped productions such as Black Clover.) Even if a particular studio doesn't have much on their plate, since in most cases it is competing for freelancers with the rest of the anime industry, it can struggle to find animators who have the time to work on their production. See
director Shin Itagaki's thoughts about the shortage of animation directors. "Itagaki stated that when "animation breakdown" happens, it is usually not because of negligence from the production assistants or because the storyboards were finished too late, but because the smaller/mid-sized production company had lost out to a bigger company in the "war for animation directors." In other words, the production has no choice but to leave bad animation as it is."
Also, there are a number of situations in which a production collapse isn't the inevitable result of a lack of resources but the result of bad management. That's what seems to have been the case in
the infamous implosion of Märchen Mädchen, for which the main blame was laid at the feet of the leadership of Hoods Entertainment. Making anime is a complicated process involving a lot of different divisions and people, and if there aren't talented managers at the center of a production making some sense of the madness, things can fall apart easily due to a number of reasons. It's fair to say that Wit Studio isn't known for having excellent management - even while it was still a substudio of Production I.G, it was known for its poorly planned projects such as Psychopass. So, in Titan's case, I think the problem is less that the studio has taken on too many projects and more that it simply isn't being managed well.