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Why are mature male VAs being cast for prepubescent males in ENG versions of anime?

My question is, why use "seiyuu" at all, even for Japanese casting, when "voice actor"/VA works just as well? It comes across as Gratuitous Japanese, and it's not like anybody says "Oh, the kantoku made an odd choice there" when talking about directors.

I don't see how I was "gratuitous" in using a Japanese equivalent of an English term...If one were to go by this sort of logic, the use of the terms "anime" and "manga" in place of "animation" and "comic" would be gratuitous.

IMO, this is precisely why female voice actors are inappropriate. Female voices are great for young characters, but once they get into the age range where puberty can hit at any time, a female voice starts sounding too feminine. It either makes the character sound younger than they are, or "too girly."

Even if the character has a male Japanese VA, sometimes the English VA's voice doesn't fit the character. It's just offputting to me to see really androgynous male characters with these deep gravely voices trying to be all badass. Cloud from FFVII is a good example. He's a very weak/sensitive character, and the Japanese VA played him really well. The English VA.. *shudder* just went way too deep to try to make him sound like this batman like mysterious cool guy. Didn't work for me.

We do have some male English VA's though with more range (Vic Mignogna, Johnny Yong Bosch for example).

I don't see any problem with the practice. While I don't watch a lot of dubbed anime, I do watch some. I have never experienced a problem listening to young male characters. I find the idea of questioning every decision on voice actor casting to be a bit silly. Unless a voice is so distracting or inappropriate as to take me out of the show, I'm fine with it.

that doesn't mean that I can't respectfully bring it into question, does it?

Oh yes, hearing gruff, deep-sounding voices from androgynous male characters can sound off-putting, I'm in agreement there. Male VAs with effeminate voices (Josh Grelle and Nicholas Roye, for instance) or middle-range/deep-sounding female VAs would be at their most effective with them. It's a huge bonus if an androgynous female VA were to voice a androgynous male.

Wait, what does that last sentence mean? Masculine sounding female voice actors maybe? Or are you asking for something else?

For the most part, I'm in complete disagreement with you. What works, works and for me, that means acting more then either trying to get the voice to match the Japanese one- honestly, that's pointless since it's not in Japanese and English voices are lower anyways- or the performance to match the Japanese one- the languages have opposite sentence structure...

Is the process perfect? Do the Japanese care about their audio in the first place? No and no. It's the second no that makes all this talk meaningless. Can a deep voice come out of a feminine yet male face? Yes, there's this show called Paradise Kiss which is all over that.

And for the opposite, I'll just say one name: Goku. Does it make sense? No but it does happen... even if it shouldn't.

However, bringing it all back to the main question, usually women are cast as young boys in both languages unless there's a reason for it. The issue with Negima was the accent and the fact he's cast against over 30 girls so you'd want to separate them as much as possible.

And then there's Black*Star from Soul Eater. Really should have been cast as a guy in both languages- what a shocker- but Brittney Karbowski did a better job than Yumiko Kobayashi because while both could do the lower register for normal speaking and yelling, Kobayashi's laughter was at her normal register.