Steamspy lists their games as having sold [in the millions](https://steamspy.com/dev/Spiderweb+Software). If they wanted to, they absolutely could afford a B+ tier art guy going through the basic steps of making their backgrounds not look like programmer art, for a few months.

You can actually see some decent concept art and character design in their current games but they're drowned out by a stubborn refusal to actually change the overall balance of detail, suffocating those decent artworks in a sea of blurry/noisy backgrounds. It's a colossal waste, really, only explainable by a stubborn refusal to "learn art", which I can respect by itself, but the post comes off as utter denial of that even happening.

It's okay to dismiss art direction and make that some kind of design philosophy, it works for their games. But blaming it on everything but dismissal feels wrong.