Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-70.82.201.126-20160110213838/@comment-4010415-20160111154416

Jaune being voiced by one of the writers also doesn't make him super overly important.

Neptune is voiced by Kerry, the other writer.

Ren was voiced by Monty, the creator of the show. Granted, Monty was originally going to voice Ozpin but felt he wasn't good enough for the role, and thus the role was handed to Shannon after an audition.

When they made Jaune, they didn't have a definite idea of what he would even be like yet. Monty had Miles do a bunch of different voices, and he liked the voice that he described as "nerdy", so they designed Jaune around that voice.

Team JNPR was originally only going to be side characters with much less significance than Team RWBY. However, Monty, Miles, and Kerry ended up loving JNPR so much that they decided to upgrade them to be about as important as Team RWBY.

It's kind of like how they loved Torchwick so much that they decided to keep him in the story instead of ditching him after the first episode.