Thank you for your time @fuulin, I appreciate the words of encouragement and advice very much! I have done a second batch of the exercises keeping in mind your points, and I for one think it has helped me.
So, cylinder people. Still have a lot of “scratchy” lines, but that’s something that’s going to take me a while to fix…
I think I got a bit carried away with the full body drawings since I’ve done this many times in the past and thought I could pull it off with only the center line. I overlaid the grid and edited the models to match it, and simply stretching their bodies seems to have been a step in the right direction. Maybe learning from anime has given me a tendency to shrink bodies or draw oversized heads.
There were still mistakes here and there, so in order for the concept to stick I did another one.
Also, more gestures. Still 1 minute.