Things are not quite settled yet though. A lot of common fallacies have been further popularized that we need to address now. At times a bit salted.
I never understood the "science versus art" attitude. I regard it as a decadence of modernity through the over-specialization of professions and social clique.
Believing that you'd be a better artist for not knowing the science of your work, or a better scientist for not knowing the art with it, that you'd have to protect your soul from the other's foul taint so you could be truthful to your respective work, is hilariously stupid. You better also avoid black cats crossing the street at a full moon's midnight. Renaissance masters especially would have just laughed at that. For it was analytic method that brought their art to the next level. The good artist has always taken much interest in the world every way of understanding, to seek out new opportunity for art. Seeing how many other fundamental aspects of art are so incredibly laborious and difficult to study, from Perspectives to Anatomy to reference material compilation, art is very tough, has always been, unafraid of science.
Art is serious enough that you can study it at university for a qualifying degree. It is serious enough that there are thick books about its problems, understanding of which improves your art considerably, but require an advanced reading comprehension. The seriousness of in-depth studies, not taking things for granted, putting in the detailed research effort, methodical and disciplined, is very much what differentiates a pro artist from a kid "having fun with pixels", as much as a chef cook's food from that in an average home kitchen. The more you reduce your art to a matter of "taste", the smaller do you keep yourself as an artist. And if you can't take your own work serious enough in study, why would anyone else take you seriously?
What is it now, are clusters too obvious or too difficult?
So what are your tutorials for then? kids stuff? a form of entertainment? or introducing people to becoming pixel artists, expanding their horizon in a meaningful way? The people that read your tutorial might think of it too obvious as well otherwise. Well, if we split target audience up like that, maybe that's the audience best served on Pixelation then. For ambitious people that want to bring their pixel art to the next level. To be honest, seeing the quality of artwork from a Helm, makes me much more interested in the explanation of his art, than reading some twitter gang throwing around one-liners. Presenting that as adding anything to the art discourse is too convenient. Debates are not about having the same opinion, but it can be way too easy having an "opinion", and whether benefit or damage comes from throwing that around is a gamble. Fortunately the people of Pixelation don't like gambling the quality of talk.. or art.
What is obvious to an experienced artist, hardly ever is to a beginner. Your work is about pedagogical teaching, making knowledge accessible, not how to protect your audience from knowledge that has influenced so many pixel artists. Your ability and method of teaching is what gives your work worth. And there's a quite the difference observable in the work of someone who just happens to do something and someone who knows very much what he's doing.
You see, there is a chain of inspirations here. You may have never cared to study clusters, but you very likely have been inspired by the works of those who did. It's too easy to call their hard work obvious then, as much as it is too careless to call the backround of concluding it too complicated. Many useful things can be boiled down to a simple formula, but concluding it never is quite so simple, and if you want to get the most out of it, you need to know more about it.
Pixel artists always needed to be exposed to a lot or arcane technical knowledge to do their work. Because pixel art was on the cutting edge of making the impossible possible. Cluster theory has historical context. It was made in a time the most popular techniques were quite different paradigms. So that was the achievement, a conscient approach to dissecting problems differently, and adapting the art to different times. Of course art theories let you make predictions. That is why you make use of their resulting techniques, because you expect a certain effect on your work. You want your work to look cleaner or smoother or whatever, so you employ a method known to achieve that. That is why clusters have been studied, to understand their consequences, and find ways this could improve your art. How much you employ this tool is everyone's own decision. The knowledge is there to serve.
