If the vector process can yield an equally satisfactorily result then it seems silly that someone would use pixel instead. Not necessarily wrong, just a bit masochistic. Panda is a poor example here, I think, as you can zoom in on his work and see how tedious and intentional it all is. It has a beautiful balance that an automatic tool would be hard-pressed to achieve. It's very zen, everything in its right place.
Demoscene perhaps doesn't take advantage of the tendency of pixelart to produce a natural shaprness, and loses a little bit of the zen aspect when overworked.
I would say we need to define this sharpness we're talking about. Pixel art is abut being 'crisp', perhaps (just to use another term to allow us to speak about sharpness). A non-AA'd line is at maximum sharpness, perhaps, but it is not as fine as it can possible be, we see squares and right angles and not the "crisp-ness" that a good pixel artist can achieve with the same line and a few shades of AA.
I'd say pixel art has a special relationship to 'shapness' that other mediums perhaps do not.
Like painting, some amount of blur is good, you probably need some blending in places, but pixelart can suffer from the same issue that painting is susceptible- the work can get too blurry, too smooth.
Here I use an example of my own art, as it is what immediately comes to mind:
[link]This painting suffers from its lack of sharpness. While in painting it would've taken me a certain amount of time and effort to tighten up the work, in pixel art the sharpness is practically inherent, the pixels won't mix or behave translucently unless I make a very conscious decision to cause them to do so. And even if I'm playing fast and loose in pixelart, it's much simpler to zoom in to the atomic level of the piece and make the image sharper than is the case in painting. Why pull out the single-hair brush and hold my breath when I've got the magnifying tool!
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apologies If I've veered off topic or rambled, it's pretty late here. this is a very interesting discussion though, I look forward to seeing how it develops.