It's about pixel and pixel shape placement. There's many ways to imply a lighting effect, a texture, a volume, but only a few of them are most intentful, developed for the art style, and clean. It's about AAing smartly when AAing is important. Your idea of where it is important might clash with mine, hence a difference of opinion. My opinion of it clashes with Ptoing for example, and he goes AA MORE and I go THAT'S ENOUGH and we laugh, but he recognizes he's AAnal and I recognize I'm a bit more interested in the overal effect than nitpicking every little detail.
But in my opinion you're a few steps away from that, and even more into the overal effect than benefits pixel art. I think you should try to be a bit more clean, even if you find later on that you drift back to being a bit more messy. Taking as an example one of your recent pictures:
where do colors touch where there's a big difference in lightness? Should you buffer then? Should you tidy shapes so they don't touch unless you really want to imply a sharp point there? It looking good initially is only... initial. The extra hand of polish needs to do all the little tweaks everywhere until something is 'clean' by my standard. Again, because I seem to be easily misinterpreted on such matters, this is just my opinion. Others can successfully argue such small edits don't really make a difference at 1x zoom and are pointless. I think 30 such small changes put the art from good to great as far as technique goes.