Dominic wrote:The off-model box art exists because there was no control art available.
I've already gone over this. Twice. Third time's the charm? The Capcom US president rushed out the release of the first game. Whether they had control art or not is a moot point considering they apparently didn't show the artist that did the box art anything to do with the game just to get it out faster. It is worth noting that they printed some of Keiji Inafune's art in the manual for the first game though, so they obviously did have the Japanese control art. They would have certainly had that control art available when they released the second game 2 years later. But for whatever reason, it was never shown to the artists who designed that box art either. They just were shown a beta of the game.
The off-model box art exists because Capcom US rushed out the games with out showing the artists much of anything. That doesn't mean they didn't have it available. For all we know, this was done intentionally so that the artists would come up with an "Americanized" design with out being influenced by the Japanese art.
And, the whole point of this is "sprite flipping was a problem in the 80s and 90s".
Dominic wrote:But, Mega Man was originally drawn holding an external handgun. The design team did not have consistent control art until the third game. As reasonable as the lore may seem, the hand/gun swap is a back-write.
This is the point. The box art from the first two games showing "Mega Man" with a hand gun has absolutely nothing to do with sprite flipping, and itself isn't a "back-write" as Mega Man was never intended to have an external hand gun in the games like that art shows. That art is therefore reasonably disregarded for being completely inaccurate.
And it's possible Capcom (Japan) always intended Rock Man to be able to use either arm for the buster because or the sprite-flipping or maybe even in spite of it. Doesn't mean it has to be a "back-write" as you're claiming. The Japanese art for Rock Man, when he has both of his hands, has always been symmetrical. Unlike say, the Ruby Spears cartoon version of Mega Man, where he had a asymmetrical design, showing one arm clearly had the buster built into it.