That's because you're not understanding what he's saying. I'll provide you with an example of what he did relative to what he's annoyed about BGS doing. Think back to Doom 3. It was supposed to be awesome-looking but ID didn't quite have the time to polish everything and the engine wasn't *that* great either. So what did they do to hide the fact that "round" things were still blocky? They made the entire damn game almost pitch black. What 74 did was the equivalent of removing that fake darkness so you could actually see the graphics involved.

There's a difference between "making things that look good" and "faking that you've made things look good". He's a graphics guy so of course he's going to know which is which, and since it's his area of expertise, he is of course somewhat annoyed that BGS took shortcuts and used that to camouflage low quality work instead of doing things properly.