Oh I see, and I agree with you both. I don't like style as an excuse, although I probably do a hell of a lot more of this myself than I'd like to admit, and when an artist uses it as a shield against critique it's just sad most of the time. That being said, there's tech critique (on this board, pixel art tech) and there's style critique. The latter isn't my biggest concern when I at least critique here, and I try to encourage other people to help each other with techniques more than they just discuss how things look and how they could look, mostly because there's a million places to go for style critique (from eatpoo, right down to asking your dad or something) but as far as I know this is the only hardcore pixel tech critiquing place around. People come when they want to learn pixel gameart, dithering, aa, selouts, pixel-art-related color theory, palette management and the like... you know, the tech. This is good. We're keeping the medium alive and self-informed. This is why I usually don't go too much into anatomy and construction and the like in critique. I might mention, but it's secondary stuff to the pixel.
About cartoony being just a variation of your realistic proccess, goat: I have to disagree. I know how to draw a human face semi-coherently and signify a lot more than just the basic symbolic information about it (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, even 'happy face' or 'sad face') and still sometimes in design I make conscious decisions to alter my usually-realistic approach, tint it with a different rule set that one would say is 'cartoony' or whatnot. It's not just 'lazy lineart that managed to live up to rendering'. At least not always. These things are always blurred.