Yeah, I remember as a kid thinking "Wait, he's old... and not cute!" They technically could have gotten someone younger to be the Prince after the spell is broken. Nobody would have cared if he was shorter and had a different voice.

I think our taste is pretty similar in many ways

Yeah, if I had to take a guess, I would have said you were the one out of all my friends who would've seen it. How funny that it was only recently though! Like you said it's obscure and if I had started pondering a year or two earlier, you wouldn't have seen it!