Sorry if this has already been brought up, but I'm not reading all 15 pages of "I like it," "I hate it" or "It's not what I envisioned" to see if it was mentioned yet:

Game watch interview with Yoshi-P bunny suit bit (in conversation about Edda's dress):

A. ...At the moment we are working to get rid of the gender lock for bunny suits for men.

Q. So men and women are going to be able to equip it?

A. Yes. The NA community had an especially high demand so we thought we should do it. Our female staff is putting hard work into creating it.
Aside from this, I don't recall any other official word on what was going on with the male bunny suits, but it was never stated here that the male version would be something original and different from the females. Removing a "gender lock" sounds more akin to keeping the original style.

But what I do take from that interview was apparently a big contributing factor for the length of time it took was they delegated it to only their female staff instead of the whole team to work on.