Custom Companions - Needs Some Revamping

I've been watching the Custom Companion page for a while now. I've been waiting and waiting for my artist of choice to say "Open", and yet the page never changes. It's been quite a while that I've been waiting, and in that time I've noticed that the other artists always stay closed too. I want nothing more than to spend my hard-earned bones on a memorial CC of my late Greyhound, Dusty, but only if I'm able to commission the artist of my choice to do it.

Now, I understand that the artists have a ton of work, but there's something wrong about having such an awesome service and never having anyone available to perform said awesome service - it's almost like making a promise you can't fulfill. There are four artists listed on the CC page - and the Ala wiki shows eight official site artists, 7 of whom are still pretty active (I noticed one hasn't been on in a long time, and another hasn't been on in a week or so). I know a couple people who have had their CC orders cancelled repeatedly because the artists were simply too busy to do the art and I can only imagine how disappointing that must have been.

Here are a couple possible remedies for this situation:
-Have all site artists available to do CCs (one or two, and depending on their other amount of work)
-Hire a couple (or a few) artists to specifically be available for CCs - this way, the current site artists would be able to focus on site art and the newly hired artists would focus on creating art for CCs.
- Allow users to commission other artists (not site artists) to draw CCs, and then have them approved by an admin before being coded - this way a user would be able to get the art done without having to wait on an official site artist, but the work would still be approved. I believe a couple mods and maybe an admin or two dabble in art (and by "dabble", I mean I believe they're quite good). It's been pointed out that this isn't really a feasible option, and for obvious reasons. So never mind this one!



Other suggested ideas:
-Have the artists able to edit their status to either open or closed - that way their status will be more accurate and they won't need to ask an admin to do it (which takes a while - our admin are just so busy fixing all the other things!)
-Have the artists set their own amount of CCs they're willing/able to work on at any given time.

Anyone have any other ideas?

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