Huh. I really should be following my own advice, but I need to post a counter to Jad's characteristically pleasant and levelheaded post, because personally didn't find much eye opening or refreshing about your points, STE.
And I'm not ready for this flame to die.
From the snipits you've provided about your glory days, it sounds like your experiences as an anarchist nonconformist illustrator/nonartist/whatever where similar to ours, except at the time it was popular and hightech so people wouldn't look at you like a subhuman-mutant if you brought up palette indexes and rastermodes in casual conversation among friends, and also nobody didn't not ever critique anything not once ever. And because you were able to share ideas and learn techniques without critique, it makes what you did practical and pragmatic, whereas when we in our future world share ideas and learn techniques and critique the application of those ideas and techniques, it, idunno, makes us assholes.
I feel like I've already begun to attack a straw man, so I'll go ahead and indulge myself. From your posts and the tone thereof, all I've been able to extrapolate is that we are all closed minded pretentious jerks, that the observations and terminology we've invented are rubbish, that any act of communal discussion above the level of cold emotionless technical pixel placement is unmitigated faggotry, that most of the old dogs critique for the sole intention of grooming their already massive egos, and (I'm really extrapolating here) that your 'scene' zeitgeist was somehow more valid than our 'pixelart' zeitgeist.
You suggest that your ideals are purely pedantic and functional, but I also get the impression that you think our defining of terminology and our writing of tutorials is wrong-headed, and that we should all just play it by ear and have all these important aspects of pixelart whatever embedded into the very being of our primal human consciousness in a blissful orgy of instinctual knowledge. This seems like a conflict of character traits (I read you as the anti-hippie type), and I don't think your idealized version of how things should work would do much good for the prospective pixel weenie who stumbles upon this place.
I feel, and I know several other people here also feel, that it is important that we do study and we do document these things, because they are wonderful and beautiful and precious and obscure, and if we don't people might forget about them, or never find out about them, or never even care to find out about them, or never even get the chance to internally debate if they should or should not care to find out about them.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally write stuff and hang out here and give people critique because I think there are useful pixel skills which can be systematically taught. I think pixel art can be approached in skilled and unskilled ways, and I think the skilled way is, 98% of the time, genuinely superior. Nobody here has ever claimed that the foundations we are attempting to build are the endall-beall way to do things. But I do feel that some sort of foundation, no matter how wobbly, will help the regular jackoff who gets interested in pixelart to not go into things completely blind.
We have and will continue get some things wrong. We will invent some bad terminology and write some bad tutorials (I am particularly guilty of both). Some of us will make some assumptions that are fundamentally flawed and be forced to rescind some established truisms. For most of us this is an underfunded archeological expedition carried out by amateurs, not a nostalgic remembrance by a council of wizened sages. We look and we think and we write about what we think. Some people will misconstrue these things as lemmas and axioms, when they are actually snapshots of our theories. What do you want from us? We dork out over pixelart and then we write about what we dork out over.
Pixel purity is balls. Everyone realizes that eventually. (?) But, is it unreasonable to expect that someone can get passionate about pixelart and and unwittingly take up the warcry of pixel purity? Humans are stupid and compulsive and operate most efficiently when their logic gates have to do as little dynamic reconfiguration as possible. Maybe pixel purity helps some developing artists build essential skills. If they limit themselves to that subset they consider legit and hardcore, doesn't it stand that by doing so they will force themselves to understand those things we see as foundational? Once that artist has matured, their thoughts can move from a mode of "If I don't use 16 colors, I might as well cut my wrists with chicken wire and bleed out on the floor" to "I can use as many colors as I want, but I'll choose use 16 colors because it makes my dick get bigger". Yes it should FUN and DYNAMIC and EXCITING but that doesn't mean you can't, at some point in life, take it a little seriously.
Okay okay, let me ask you some some straight questions, ones not laced with rationalization or justification. It would seem that there is us, then there is you. Why? Can you become a part of us? Can we become a part of you? Is there really any difference between us and you?