Lynxara
Nice post!!
Two points.
1) Pretty Cure is not really comparable to Kamen Rider as a franchise, not yet. Kamen Rider is a franchise going on 40 years old, with the name of one of Japan's most beloved mangaka attached to it. Pretty Cure appears to be an in-house IP Toei cooked up so it could have a reliable magical girl franchise. People will get upset over things done with the Kamen Rider IP in a way that they just won't with Pretty Cure, not for a good 20 years.
2) Pretty Cure gets dramatically less interest from the otaku community than Sailor Moon did back in the day. There just are not words for the difference in degree. I feel like this is the result of Toei engineering elements of Pretty Cure to minimize otaku interest. Most notably, Pretty Cure features precious little of the simulated nudity or lesbian fanservice that made Sailor Moon (in)famous.
I think it is true that Toei just doesn't care about catering to the otaku community with its mass-market brands, but I think the company's stance probably goes beyond mere indifference. Otaku culture has come under sharp criticism from the Japanese mainstream in the past few years. Toei has no reason to even want to appear to associate its big brands directly with otaku culture. Not when they're licensing out more mainstream products like Ichigo onesies.
