I guess this is a little of both.

The brag part is I was pretty stoked to find a Serpenth named The Time Keeper in the pound.

He's currently glacier. I already have a glacier pet, so I hopped on the wiki to look at other color options for him.

The complaint is, a lot of the other colors for Serpenth seem /really/ hastily drawn compared to what I'm used to seeing on Subeta. Is this an older species and they just haven't updated it yet?

Yes, it's an older species that needs updating. Those "hastily drawn" examples are not recent ;)

Serpenth is one of the older species, that's correct. A bit of a running joke by now, really... It lost 'its' artist a few years back and since then appeals for more Serpenth revamps return with increased frequency. If you saw the 'what colors/revamps you's like to see this Morostide' half of it is about Serpenths.

We still have hope :P

Right now, they're hiring artists, so in a few months they'll hopefully have a few redraws, with how many people have been complaining about serpenths!

Actually the Serpenth already has an artist at the moment. So hiring new ones isn't going to effect that species at all.