I get that it's (apparently) a good way for artists to make money... but I don't get what's being sold. Is it a print? Is it a commission? Something about this transaction feels like the person paying is being ripped off. Let's take a look at the latest person I've seen in my submissions page and look at what's being offered:
(Note: I have nothing against Jace, he is a fine person and an artist of delicious things that I love)

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5761247
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5761259
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5761268
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5761278

These adoptables are a little different than the ones I've seen from other artists in that it looks like Jace actually took the time to draw each dragon roughly from scratch. Okay, so we've got work and effort going into these but for the most part every other adoptable I've seen has been a palette swap of a single drawing.

I don't really have any dragon characters to my name save for one I wrote about in Dragonslayer and maybe somewhere else... and should I need to make another dragon for another story, I'm fairly confident in my ability to think one up from scratch to suit my purposes. I'm assuming these characters will "belong" to the person who pays for them and they can be used in any work that person happens to make.

So, is buying an adoptable like outsourcing a portion of your creative process? Is it that difficult to try and think up a new character for a story or picture? What about characters that happen to look similar to those sold as adoptables? We can go into a nice discussion about what constitutes a reasonable differentiation between characters, but that aside what's to stop me from seeing these pictures and take little bits and pieces of their design to form a new character? I haven't paid for any adoptable, yet I'm not necessarily using any one complete dragon.

People do this all the time. Artists use references and make generic characters for their pictures (Here's something fun to try: line up some dalmatian characters and try to tell them apart.) Every writer has heard the old saying "Nothing original has been written since Homer." So why should I pay money for a new character I can simply think up in my head for free?

I'd rather buy a commission from an artist and pay money for something I want or (occasionally) buy a print of a picture that artist put more effort into. Again, I have nothing against Jace and I think he's a fantastic artist! But when I see

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5705243
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/5744301

coming from more and more artists, I have to wonder who buys a copy-pasted character and for what reason?