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Did heavily edited early dubs help the industry?

Nah I think bad dubs and the hack jobs hurt and stereotyped the genre as something super niche or for kids.

I remember hearing Billy Bob Thornton’s horrible voice in Princess Mononoke in the theater and almost never watching another Ghibli movie.

As a kid I watched G-Force and it was horrid but I was a kid so had bo discernment. Any adult watching would just dismiss it as trash. And it was.

That probably slowed the popular spread and adoption of anime as a mainstream entertainment in the west. But times are changing and higher quality helps more audiences accept it.

So I’ll say the crappy older dubs hurt bit good ones in the last 10 years are helping.

Nah I think bad dubs and the hack jobs hurt and stereotyped the genre as something super niche or for kids.

I remember hearing Billy Bob Thornton’s horrible voice in Princess Mononoke in the theater and almost never watching another Ghibli movie.

I think that's a rather short-sighted take on things. It's easy to look back now and mock the edits and adaptation choices in shows like Speed Racer or Star Blazers or Robotech or Sailor Moon or DBZ, but the fact is that most of those shows never would have been broadcast on US television if they weren't significantly edited.

I genuinely believe that if you lost those edited TV broadcasts in the 90s, then anime would have stayed a niche hobby consigned to importing and tape-trading for far longer than it did.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and sites like this one show why this current situation is far from ideal. There's always only a surface level knowledge of the medium with a massive lack of perspective on it.

I'm sorry, but that kind of elitist gatekeeping is just childish. If you're truly a fan of something, then you should want to share your love for it with as many people as you can, so that they can experience the same sense of joy and discovery that you did. It's not about creating an elitist walled garden that only the "chosen few" can access.

You say that FotNS or Saint Seiya are in a better place, but by what possible measure? The former is unarguably THE seminal battle shonen series that influenced everything after it, and yet even many dedicated anime fans in the US only know about it because of a meme. And the latter...well, most anime fans in this country probably don't even know it existed, because they had no way of being exposed to it. In what way is that a better fate than shows that remain household names decades after they first aired and helped introduce millions of fans to the medium as a whole? Would that every series could be so lucky.

Especially shows like Robotech and DBZ, it would have gone a long way to avoid the terrible reign of companies like Harmony Gold over the Macross license, and all of the sheer chaos and confusion that followed Funimation's amateur treatment of a series they only got the license to via nepotism (like not only the numerous dubs and score changes, but also their garbage, worse than mediocre home video releases that can't ever get it right or present it in its proper context/state).

The bolded is the problem, why is it only the US (and by extension the Anglosphere) that for so long was worse at handling anime series than just about everywhere else in the world that got them?

There have been tons of other countries that also produced their own localized anime dubs and not just the US and some other countries had worse dubs than US productions. You can look up any changes that was done to the South Korean dub of Sailor Moon and that was a far worse dub than anything DiC did.

You know even if those shows got picked up by other companies they still would have gotten a localized dub because anime fandom didn't exist back in the mainstream back then and shows like DB and Macross are for little kids. Funimation wasn't even the first company to dub DB as there were other companies who tried producing their own localized dubs first including Harmony Gold. If Toei truly hated Funimation's treatment of DB, they've had lots of chances to pull the license from them but they never had. And DB is dubbed uncut nowadays.

There have been tons of other countries that also produced their own localized anime dubs and not just the US and some other countries had worse dubs than US productions. You can look up any changes that was done to the South Korean dub of Sailor Moon and that was a far worse dub than anything DiC did.

I don't think they had any significant influence at all. Over the last twenty five years or so in this forum and others, we have had people pose questions as to "What was your first anime" and "How did you get into anime". In a lot of cases the answer for the first question was one of those heavily edited shows. However the answer to the second question was that they came to anime fandom separately and didn't realized that the early show was anime until they became fans.