Regarding the first point, Tom started building his ship some time before the Epsilon Blade was laid down, but he didn't make his first long-distance test flight until a few weeks after the Toy Box was launched. (I really do need to nail down the timeframe better before I bug Mal to set me up with a wiki account.)
As far as the second point goes, it could also be a bit of an issue politically because there are hundreds of thousand of brave and compassionate women in Fenspace whose achievements deserve that honour at least as much as Barbara does, and it would be very easy to accuse Queen Serenity of favouritism for singling out someone who happens to be dating a friend of hers. (And she got the mental picture of "Sailor Sappho" as a really butch lesbian in a fuku stuck in her head and couldn't stop laughing for nearly half an hour afterwards, which probably didn't help.) Out-of-universe, I'm also wary of making one of my characters that accomplished in 'canon' when I'm still a relative newbie.
As far as the second point goes, it could also be a bit of an issue politically because there are hundreds of thousand of brave and compassionate women in Fenspace whose achievements deserve that honour at least as much as Barbara does, and it would be very easy to accuse Queen Serenity of favouritism for singling out someone who happens to be dating a friend of hers. (And she got the mental picture of "Sailor Sappho" as a really butch lesbian in a fuku stuck in her head and couldn't stop laughing for nearly half an hour afterwards, which probably didn't help.) Out-of-universe, I'm also wary of making one of my characters that accomplished in 'canon' when I'm still a relative newbie.