I'm honestly not sure I'd call them a 'leader' in much of anything except a race to the bottom. Pretty much no-one I've ever met of any remotely professional approach cares for DA, at best -- most people, even those who only dally in art, hate DA with a passion. They don't have a good reputation for quality or professionalism, and I think the only thing they stand out in most people's minds with is shameless profiteering with very low quality. Also censorship, of course, but not of any things that they purport to stand against, like hate speech, et cetera -- no, the only things they really stand up to take from their site are nudity and sexuality, unless of course the subject is hot lesbians that they can objectify.

DeviantArt is absolutely vile. I do think that, unquestionably, eventually another art community will blow them out of the water, but I think really the best thing to do is just to support separate communities rather than one mass group of people that aren't really a community. DA is basically just a bunch of people smashed together who don't really take their art seriously, or anyone else's for that matter; it's in the smaller and closer sites, where you actually find community, where art actually thrives and people actually create.

I do think people on the whole are moving beyond the whole 'oh my god can't look at sex/nudity' and I can only hope so. Nudity doesn't equal sex (but apparently a lot of websites imagine it does) and in any case, it's not an unnatural thing. But as I've said many times before, most people will never see brutal, graphic violence in their lives, but most people will see sex, even participate in it. Why, then, is sexuality and even nudity such a supposedly controversial thing, whereas violence tends to get a free pass? Ridiculous.