It's been a while since I was reading in this area, and obscenity prosecutions have tanked so thoroughly that there may be no modern caselaw on the subject, but I recall that there was at least initially some concern that the topic be worthy of artistic depiction -- so a beautifully rendered garbage bin might lack artistic merit. But that makes artistic merit ultimately dependent on other factors, as opposed to being a separate route to protection, and many people would say that art has its own standards. The problem that the skill-as-merit interpretation creates is that it would protect a successful photorealistic depiction of an image that would be obscene if it were a photo. Now, given the difficulty of creating such an image and the unlikelihood that it would appear in a porn magazine, this discrepancy could certainly be tolerated; obscenity law would still mostly do its job (whatever that is). But neither position seems particularly attractive to me.

I'm sure we'll eventually hear that the change was designed to be destigmatizing. But maybe they should have announced that in advance.