Production bible and writers' meetings? (Or: How is Super written?)

[Cipher]

Can someone more knowledgeable about weekly anime production weigh in? How typical is it to have a Western-style production bible for story purposes?

For those uninitiated, a production bible contains content to guide writers on a particular series (or even multimedia production), containing character details, general narrative outlines, etc.

Is this typically the norm for this type of production in Japan? Especially when it's an adaptation of a weekly manga, or, in this odd case, an adaptation of notes from a manga author? Is this type of extensive guide material put together outside of visual elements? Or do they simply rely on the author's original work without in-house embellishment?

Alternately, how do writers' meetings tend to take place? This already varies between various stateside and Japanese productions I'm aware of, sometimes consisting of long meetings between a regular staff of writers who rotate script duties, sometimes coming down to providing details to freelancers or staff writers who don't regularly, or ever, meet with one another. With Super, what do we think or know to be the case? Is there a large meeting in which all script-writers work to flesh out a narrative outline from Toriyama's notes? Does it come down to a few supervisors who distribute assignments? And who oversees scripts to catch deviations or elements that aren't up to par? (Surely someone is coordinating episodes' endings and beginnings lining up for its tight serialized approach, but beyond that?)

Does anyone even have time for this on a rushed production like Super?

Part of why I'm asking is that Toyotarou taking such a clear approach to characters' strengths in the manga leads me to believe the anime may have been largely outlined around the same weaker powers since the Universe 6 arc, but that between a pool of writers, this might not be well-communicated, particularly if there aren't regular meetings or a bible. Is there anyone to discuss, or catch, difference in approach between, say, the Super-Human Water filler arc and the Trunks material? For that matter, we know relative strength could get pretty slipshod during anime-only material in the original run as well, which is part of why I so heavily question whether there's any kind of guide for key elements outside of the author's manga/notes; and in this particular series and genre, relative strength in a general sense is indeed a key element. And then you have personality differences, etc., which have stacked up in this new manga-less era.

But I'm also curious in a general sense about how the sausage gets made. We've discussed the animation endlessly, but not much about its writing from a top-down approach. There are other elements in the series that lead me to believe communication or guide materials aren't strong (the fact that we never got an explanation for the Pilaf gang's age during the movie adaptations is still absurd, and feels like it was meant to go in someone's script), but I'm pretty ignorant about the usual process for this kind of show in Japan, and whether Super can be considered "usual" in any sense at all.

[Neon Z]

There's a staff member responsible for "Series Composition", who's supposed to be the unifying factor, defining the general content that will be covered by each episode's writer and attempting to maintain consistency between them. Depending on the show, the director also might have story input, although I don't think it's generally the case with Dragonball.

Series bibles don't seem to be common in Japan, considering how departure of main writers have caused pretty noticeable changes and inconsistencies in various anime-original series through the years.

[Chuquita]

My guess would be there's some guidelines for characters, but that the writers don't actually have group meetings. Each of the 5 writers have such distinct approaches to certain characters (I guess Gokû is the biggest variant; how energetic he is seems to fluctuate depending on the writer) that I feel they probably don't interact with each other much where they'd feel they'd need to agree on these things. I think certain cases where one of them sees what another one has done and goes "I like that, let me build off it" happens, but not often.