Yey! Interesting topic. I've been thinking about this as well and I've been looking for a mosaic that strictly follows a grid, but haven't found one yet, at least not one that'd be as old as these. Cross stitches however must by necessity follow a grid, so in that area we have some good examples of classic pixel art.

My mom does knitting with machines and patterns from time to time, which I think uses a grid as well.  I always think that I should make a pixel art and ask her to turn it to a shirt (we have the software and I think hardware to do so), but I never get around to doing so.

Selective brick laying.

Actually, I think there needs to be less contrast since these are ground tiles, and don't want to be blending with the foreground.

I think it's better not to anti-alias on the outer edges (much like how Jad's only uses AA on the inside of the sprite) because your anti-aliasing was meant for a white background, and not taking transparency into account.

I think the "blurry arcade CRT monitors" part is an important thing to consider.  Squint your eyes to make the sprite blur up and the selout effect is far less noticeable and gives an illusion of sharpness.  It's probably why selout doesn't work too well when we study it or use it because we have nice clean monitors to work with with 1:1 pixel aspect ratio and little blurring of said pixels.