I enjoyed your input and analysis, Nimrod, and I want to thank you for alerting me to LSG's recent video. But as a die-hard LSG fan, I must dispute some points. As for rating her beauty (eye of the beholder and all that), I've always thought -- even ignoring her chest size -- she was nothing short of a knock-out, algorithms be damned.
As for her decidedly UN-ignorable chest, you rightly point out that she didn't reach her maximum until her mid-30's (after childbirth), although I always found it hot that she became famous for her boobs somewhat late in her career and that it happened on network TV. In a film, "Nina Takes a Lover," made just a few years before Just Shoot Me! premiered, her character poses before a mirror and squeezes her tits together, trying to make them large enough to lure the guy she's after, something Maya Gallo would never have to do. Dr Fashizzle posted a morph of this a few pages back.
You're also right that it was unusual at the time for a TV character's tit-size to be regularly referred to by others in the show. But I don't know what fan sites you've seen, but comments about her rack were NOT common from the outset. Yes, the earliest remark came in only the 3rd episode (see screen-cap below), but it was pretty tame. Nina wears falsies to test-run the boob-job she's considering. When Maya keeps warning her of possible health dangers, Nina says, "I know what this is about. You just want to have the largest breasts in the office." There really aren't any other references to her boobs in season one.
It wasn't until mid-way in season 2 -- when Nina tells Maya to put her shoulders back and chest out, then says, "Good God, Maya! Can you even see what color your shoes are?" -- that any attention to their enormity is made. Yet later in the season, when Maya is tricked by a fashion designer (Dana Carvey) into wearing a gown that's transparent under certain lights, Finch says nothing about the tits he supposedly can see. In subsequent seasons that would never pass without some crack about melons or whoppers or such.
Season 3 is when things really got going. In a Maxim interview, David Spade said JSM! started getting lots of letters about Laura's breasts and the writers responded to public demand. In another interview he said he'd replace lines in the script where Finch referred to Maya's boobs with jokes of his own. One of my favorites, which I bet Spade wrote, came in season 6: Maya enters the Blush offices and says, "Guess what I have behind my back?" Finch says, "Some kind of counter-weight system to keep you from tipping over?" Classic.
I want to note two benchmarks of the attention paid to Laura's pair. The first was in season 4 ("Tea and Secrecy"): When Finch discovers that Maya and Elliott are having an affair, he loudly says, "So many questions! Well, I think the first question on America's mind is, 'Are they real?' " This sort of breaks the fourth wall, referring to the fact that there was much discussion going on about whether or not Laura had recently had implants. (Obviously not true.) Maya/Laura's jugs had become the focus of national interest.
The other benchmark came in season 6 ("Christmas? Christmas!"): Finch and Nina are playing a word-association game, saying the first things that come to mind when they look at each other. The game turns ugly and Nina flees when Finch starts saying things like, "old," and "wrinkly." But just as Nina leaves the room, Maya enters and Finch immediately says, "Boobs!" It makes the point that LSG, once a mid-level mainstream actress, had transformed and was now more renowned as a set of huge, splendid jugs.
The attire Laura started to wear at her public appearances showed she wasn't completely ill-at-ease with the fact that more notice was now made to her mammaries than to her acting. But she never really exploited that attention with semi-nude titillating photo-shoots or the like. And she never showed off much cleavage, either in person or on JSM! I think her status as a boob-goddess was one she hadn't expected or could totally embrace, but as Salem's recent posting of the news that Laura has risen to number 33 (YAY!) on the BEA's top 150 list (the highest of any mainstream actress) indicates, as long as men adore large-breasted brunettes of singular beauty, she will not be forgotten.