I'm tired of having to activate detective mode on a video game every time a trailer or piece of art is released.

You could just... not. You choose the one-drop rule against the fancy denoiser.

None of the art in this game was imposed on them by aliens. A team of artists said 'we need an evocative painting for like five seconds and we'll fix it up later.' This is the very earliest look at the project. It's not placeholders making it into a finished game; it's exactly where you'd expect to see placeholders. And placeholders of the sort where stick figures won't do. It has to look polished at a glance, and then nobody should miss it when it's not in the next version. For this particular game they surely considered grabbing a Dutch master's lesser work off Wikipedia.

They do this 'we're sowwy' song-and-dance because the alternatives are even less serious. You want the whole industry to reject these tools? Ain't happening. Too useful. But they're not gonna flop their dick on the table say 'deal with it' because the performative backlash would just get louder. Weak excuses are gentle appeasement about something everyone's going to keep doing, because it works.

A studio comprised of A Guy could now crank out voice acting for an entire RPG, and unique portraits for every NPC, and animated FMV cutscenes, using little more than patience and taste. Quality's worse than hiring a thousand people for seven years. Quelle surprise. But somewhere in-between, you can spend merely five million dollars, and get a game done in a year, that feels like it took ten. If you still gag when a character's buttons are in the wrong place, at some point that's a you problem. The buttons are not really the point of the work.