It's good you boil it down to this, because that's something I'd like to talk about.
When I see a line of proper high level code, I see much more in it, because I know what actually happens down on the low. And this realization, consciously and sub-consciously, heavily impacts many decisions on the higher levels. Many of my high level decisions would be much poorer without. It is often actually pretty severe, in how it influences radical architecture design, choice of algorithms and math. Because just as art draws from visual reality, coding has to deal with the reality of hardware, even if we like to forget that these days. For me there is no clear cut border between low level and high level, that it would be these two entirely different worlds of thinking modes, divided by the vacuum of space, and you should stay on the warmer and brighter one, 90% of your time.
And a similar idea guides my thoughts about pixel art. To slightly caricature the problem, the sentiment of basically "Well, I should rather be doing some real art than pixel art in my time -- more bang for the buck", is somewhat understandable, but a pixel art that is a mere after-thought, robs you a lot of unique creative inspiration, a reason to bother with any pixel art at all, and affects how you construct pixel art tools.
Many of the system features of how graphics work, how colour palette, and tiles and sprites work, how you manage your resources as an artist, how you go about constructing things, the reality of the tool given, is also a high level inspirational component to your creativity. It kinda goes into how people feel that the limits of pixel art stimulates their creativity. Pixel Art is a joint effort, and the design decisions of coders and artists affected each other. And the creativity coders put into pixel art tools has been much more than restricting it in some number, it also provided mechanics with which to rethink the art on more than the lowest level, sometimes in new surprising ways, be it good or bad, that still had another value to art, that other art tools didn't give.
And by that thought, a pixel art that's just reduced to the problem of how many colours, and how to dither and aa, is just a little fragment of what pixel art means to me creatively, and how that guides my own development. I indeed want to make pixel art deep. This is my motivation and mindset for design. Is it true? can it be? even if not, I feel it's better for my work to go at it with this attitude, to search for what makes pixel art worth your time. And that's sort of why I look for the creative "dignity" and opportunity of pixel art, as something more than a robot's labor or an autist's obsession.
So that's where I am coming from. I understand your position though, that the pixel art scene is beset by too much lack in art fundamentals, and that this is most what holds back many in their pixel art, and thus your response is the other way around.
