We might be talking about different things, Helm. I'm just saying I can better appreciate pixel art at 2x. I might be able to appreciate it at 1x too, but then I'd have to put my nose to the monitor unless it's a HD fighter game or a smiley. I can't appreciate pixel art at all from 1km away, to use an extreme.
You're probably talking about the difficulty of ... taking a nicely pixeled 64*32 character and making it 32*16 and having it look better. I'd agree that it's difficult but your definition of "better" is probably narrow as it appears to be suggesting that more definition on character = better, which is not always the case, and it also ignores the appeal which comes with knowing that a piece was done by beautifully utilizing limited resources.
And making highrez pixel art is also a lot more difficult and time consuming, so that 2x lowrez piece might actually end up looking better anyways due to limited time and available talent.