"The cat starter is obviously furry bait..." Wh... What? It's. It's just a cat. That eye shape has also been used for other Pokémon plenty of times before. All Pokémon, especially nowadays, get design inspiration from something in the real world — disregarding it and putting down the design because it could appeal to furries seems a little unfair, and suggests that the character designers don't do any research.
Incineroar being brought up in here especially has me baffled, because it's so obvious that it's based off of the close association between tigers and wrestlers. It's even thought out enough that its Dark type represents a heel in professional wrestling. (In other words, Incineroar plays the "bad guy" role, which especially makes sense for Dark types, given they're "Evil" types in Japanese.) I do feel like its first evo wasn't the best predictor for the last one, but it's still really cool inspiration while taking it in a unique direction so it's its own creature that draws upon its origin, especially given that Hawai'i (the place the region is based off of) is a working place for a lot of professional wrestlers. It being fire type is especially a neat bonus because I remember going to Hawai'i and seeing a show there and seeing these beefy men not too far off of Incineroar's base who would play around with fire.
The cat starter's design philosophy right now doesn't seem all that different from Rockruff which never received this level of criticism. Or like... any of the cute basic animal starters which have been in the games since the beginning. I think it's cute, which is obviously what it was going for. I'm hesitating considering any of them my favorite until I see the final evos, but it's not a bad starting point by any means. Sometimes a Pokémon can just like, be a cat, you know?
(Given the starters often follow a theme and they may draw inspiration from Spanish culture, though, I'm interested to see how much of that will show in the later evolutions of this particular cat. The inspiration isn't obvious yet in this stage, but it isn't for any of them, so I want to see what direction it goes in.)
