When I was sharing anthro pornography with a friend, he told me this question. Upon careful consideration, many anthro arts overlook hair, feathers, scales, and so on

A lot of furry/anthro art is on more of a human base, with non-human elements selectively written over parts.
Also drawing fur/feather/scale details is a lot more effort than drawing smooth skin.

Edit:
For a slightly more in-depth answer..
A majority of people who make and view anthro art are still fundamentally attracted to human features more than non-human ones, so the human features keep being represented in the artwork.

Because detailed hair, fur, feathers, and scales are very time-consuming and difficult to draw?
It's easier to just colour it in with a single thick brush stroke, rather than spend a very long time working on the details.

Well these days there are special fur brush addons you can get and add to pretty much every drawing software out there that helps draw full body fur in mere minutes as opposed to drawing every strand of hair on its own that could take months.

But then again drawing fur on anthros tend to look kinda weird tho when you start putting clothes on them as well, i've actually seen comments in the past that go the other way too, like: "why put clothes on anthros when they already have fur?"

Many artists tend to not drawing them to avoid clutter. Drawing large areas with too many details such as feathers and scales and fur can make the general piece lack spots for the viewer's eyes to rest. Cause viewing an art piece has a subconsious tendecy to look at specific details that are deliberitally placed by the artist at a specific area then look elsewhere to rest from analyzing. Usually that is done with a background with lighter or darker tones (dependant on the tones of the main subject) and reduced details.

If a piece doesnt have a background and is for example a pinnup, the focus is the face (or the spicier areas) and the rest spot is a body devoid of very snall and less significant details. If one was to fill that space with every individual scale or feather you would over-saturate the whole thing.

There is a way to incorporate fur, scales and feather into a rest area by having them be low contrasting in tone compared to the rest of the "rest" area or only incorporate it in core shadow/shadow areas.

TL:DR : Avoiding clutter and detail over-saturation

there's one artist in particular that tries to sell his antros as having fur all the way around is tegerio, who often draws his nipples poking out of the character's fur and even makes their labia majora furred
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he doesn't even really use that many lines to sell the look and texture of fur compared to how other artist go to shade the skin of their subjects all glossy-like to moreso sell them as being skin, so it does feel more like a deliberate artistic choice my those other artists to affect the human form over an animistic one

sidenote: does anyone know where to find the art of papier confetti? saw it in patricia taxxon's recent work and i think it's both a good example of a furry with fur and also i want to follow them

furries are still recognizable as animals/having animal features even without huge amounts of fur and such being drawn. Which is probably the most important thing for people. Especially if the key parts are there like snouts or beaks

Usually, if characters get fur drawn, it will be a few tufts only, perhaps a few clumps of mussed fur that aren't tufts, but that's it. In practice, this is often just breaking the characters' smooth outlines with some zigzags.

People overtagging barely represented clumps as tufts is one of my thousand tag-related triggers. Likewise, people tagging fur, scales, or feathers when there is literally none there but the tagger associates mammal/scalie/avian => furred/scaled/feathered. Another one: tagging *_fur for two tufts and no other effort in drawing fur is hella weak. Yall are just pumping up your tag count with garbage while making the site worse for the people who want to find these things in good representation, like the OP. For those reasons, I do not recommend the OP even try searching fur/scales/feathers to find more realistic furry art. Fur has 1.377M uses, and it's kinda just a bad tag :). Scales at 119K is equally abused. Feathers at 187K isn't as bad because it's carried by feathered wings, which usually do have actual feathers. It's completely free and faster to just not tag superfluous things that aren't there at all or are barely there, but alas.

Cheek tuft is in the running for most underused tag relative to occurrence and "value," even at 65K uses. No idea why someone would search cheek tuft, but at least it's a common, obvious feature that's usually included in character designs. A LOT of mammals have cheek tufts, some that probably don't IRL are given them anyway, avians are selectively given cheek tufts, and many scalies are given equivalent cheek spikes, spines, or frills. Hell, sometimes scalies are given furred cheek tufts anyway when the rest of their body seems scaled/smooth. Because.

Tails are a curious exception. Tails get much more fur detailing than the rest of the body. The simple explanation would be that tails are for show, an acceptable and expected area for distinguished flourishes. A pride point. A feather in the owner's cap, to use a very apt expression. Fluffy tail seems a less abused tag.

Ideally, detailed_fur/detailed_scales/detailed_feathers get used for high-effort renderings. In practice, well, ignoring the cluster of detailed_fur I tagged recently, about 60% of the other uses are good and the others are poor examples. Good for catching bad tag jobs, if for some reason one wants to subject themself to that.

abadbird said:
People overtagging barely represented clumps as tufts is one of my thousand tag-related triggers. Likewise, people tagging fur, scales, or feathers when there is literally none there but the tagger associates mammal/scalie/avian => furred/scaled/feathered. Another one: tagging *_fur for two tufts and no other effort in drawing fur is hella weak. Yall are just pumping up your tag count with garbage while making the site worse for the people who want to find these things in good representation, like the OP. For those reasons, I do not recommend the OP even try searching fur/scales/feathers to find more realistic furry art. Fur has 1.377M uses, and it's kinda just a bad tag :)

honestly, thanks for this

i don't got the same tag trigger as you do, but i've been tagging my chikn nuggit uploads with <color>_fur pretty much everytime despite the fact that almost all the chikn nuggit cast are smoother than a smoothie. i ain't even consistent with this as i won't tag colored scales unless there are visible scales. so you've really opened my eyes with how superfluous my tagging has been and i'm gonna try to be better about tagging fur in the future and do my best to edit out all my previous tag jobs

abadbird said:
Tails are a curious exception. Tails get much more fur detailing than the rest of the body. The simple explanation would be that tails [..]

When looking at "scales" of anthropomorphism, the extremities of a figure are what experience animalistic features before anywhere else. Tails and ears are the first two notable changes from a pure-human figure, and as far as many non-furries are willing to explore before becoming uncomfortable. Tails will always be one of the most animal features on a furry figure because instead of being a feature that overwrites something human, they are added as already a fully animal feature^{disregarding matters of where they're placed on the figure and how they appear to function}.
For the same reason you'll often see fur-detailed heads, hands, and/or feet in posts where otherwise the body is smooth with a human-compliant form, as those are typically next on the list of extremities to modify.

But expanding further on my rushed reply earlier
I think human-compliant sexual interaction visuals are still an important part of relevant artwork to a lot of people. Particularly gendered elements such as pronounced chins, jawlines, facial hair, and torso musculature are often present in art where masculine-attraction is a focus. Also head hair, eyelashes, filled lips, smaller/more humanoid facial features, hands, and feet^{than their masc counterparts in the same work} where feminine-attraction is a focus, are still frequent features in furry art. Particularly areas like the receptive genitals, breasts, and buttocks have frequent focus on human-compliant appearance and surface-deformation when handled, even in the near proximity of more-animal features or superficial fur covering:
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(This post is probably still a mess, one of my neighbours appears to be shoveling gravel nonstop right now and it's hard to think)