Reading comments on Hacker News isn't "reading carefully". We're operating on a pretty shallow level of conversation right now.
What I find funny is that you chide me for assigning things an intrinsic value, and then go right ahead and try to assign a formula for value based on time played/money. You're doing exactly what you accused me of. And you're being far snottier about it than I am, which is also kind of funny, because I'm the one being the snob here.
See, unlike you, I don't assign any monetary value to time. I don't divide twenty by six or a thousand by ninety to decide if something's been worth it. That's stupid, all due respect. I don't divide the hours I wear a shirt by the money I paid for it either. Instead, I value the experience of that time spent. I'll take six hours of unique, novel gameplay with gorgeous graphics and good music to a thousand hours looking at generic FPS, listening to generic FPS sound, playing what amounts to fairly generic gameplay. What I liked about Half-Life 2, actually, that made it worth my time, was that it had so many elements of gameplay merge into a fairly simple control set. Valve's flawed in a lot of ways, but when I spend time on their stuff they give me an experience.
I mentioned the time and money those developers spent not because I think it makes their game more valuable, but because I empathize with them and with what they made. If we want to use another bullshit metric, 6hrs/2ppl = 3, whereas 1000hrs/550ppl = less than two, not to mention we're talking two games that cost obscene amounts of time/money to provide. So those two people are producing more than those 550, with less money spent.
"Less money spent", that's another issue. See, I can't sympathize with your twenty dollars. It's twenty dollars. If you're cheap enough to regret a twenty dollar purchase, I think you're being kind of whiny. But what I can't stand are those games that take millions of dollars to make, but don't have any sort of ingenuity behind them. I think that's a horrible, horrible waste. Can't stand games that lack ingenuity. So for me, Far Cry is yet another disaster of a game, and World of Goo, while imperfect, is a small little gem. And that's why it offends me that the sort of person who would spend a thousand hours shooting pixels would hate on a title with an inventive physics system, especially when it was made both with money that wasn't that much on a huge scale but was a lot to the two people that had to spend it. In the case of Ubisoft, you have the opposite case: A hell of a lot of money burnt up because it really didn't matter much to the people who had to spend it.