I'll admit, the first impression thing is kind of true, but what if they are only seeing a still screenshot on a Steam page? You can't see much in the way of animations there. Also, as far as speaking as a consumer, I'm not going to go on a store page, and say "Whoaa, what, Celeste only has four frames, this game sucks". I'm going to say "Oh, wow, this looks like a really fun platformer". I feel like the average consumers (read: NOT huge nerds like us who discuss this stuff on a fan-game board) aren't aware of things like "frame count", or "pixel consistency". One other thing I'll agree on is I do hate it when pixel art games have inconsistent sizes with pixels, or with HUD elements. Mostly how mobile games have smooth text with pixel graphics. Now, that is glaring, and looks like shit. It's not enough to make me not play a game though (Being a mobile game does that instead ).
I'm not saying that you are wrong, cause you do have a couple valid points, but I just think that as others have said, not everyone will care as much about the small details. I think some people (myself included) can get a bit rustled when a fellow hobbiest game designer comes along, and says "If you don't put in this amount of effort, and do it this way, you are doing it wrong, and your game will fail". I know you obviously take illustration, and animation very seriously (and you do good work) but sadly not everyone is on that same level, and therefore may prioritize other aspects of game design closer to their own interests above it. You focus on this stuff cause it is what you love. Others may love making levels, implementing physics, and puzzles, or writing the stories, or doing sound, and all of those people would likely say that the thing they love most is the most important aspect. Not always, but people tend to defend what they love.. Hence this thread.
And to call people lazy is another triggering blanket statement. As NoeL mentioned, it can be a style choice. And like Dimentio said, sometimes more frames isn't so great. This is why, for example, I'm don't use Z3 animation in ZC. Sure, it looks better, but in ZC, Link is the only thing that would have more than four frames, so it would look jarring and inconsistent. You may say I'm lazy for not re-programming the game from the ground up to use more frames, but since I'm just one guy, with next to no coding experience, that is not going to happen. I'd argue that this is a "limitation" too. Not a hardware limit, but a limitation on what I, or anyone, could do by themselves.