That comment was probably referring to TG 0.9. It is correct in a technical sense, but not in an artistic or absolute sense if you ask me. You don't see many good 3DS Max landscapes and there's a reason for this. Even TG 0.9 was better at making landscapes as far as that specific purpose is concerned. Max is obviously more versatile, but if what you wanted to do was landscapes then TG was a better bet, unless you had the $600 DreamScapes plugin.
The simple fact is that some people pay large amounts of money for their software, or steal it and think that the more it costs, the better it must be. So they have the misconception that money has something to do with quality and capability in a fundamental sense. There is obviously a real-world relationship, but it is a secondary effect of economic factors, not a primary definer of this reality. So when these people, heavily invested in their application of choice, see a program doing what they struggle to do much easier, they dismiss it as "cheap", "too easy", etc. Somehow it must not be "art" because it's "easy".
Clearly these people are also often laboring under the impression that "art" has anything to do with effort. The definition of art is a tricky one, but I don't think effort is a necessary qualifier.
In any case there is a lot of bias in certain posters on CGTalk. You can be sure of the value of someone's opinion if they judge the finished product and not the application. They would argue that some programs make it easy to create great artwork virtually without effort, but such a reality, if true, should also be taken into account when judging *all* art, and thus the standard should be raised and again we are back to the basic fairness of judging a work by its merit and its peers, plain and simple.
Another interesting thing these people seem to overlook is that "point and click" is exactly what photographers do - they don't even press a button to auto-generate their landscape - and yet photographers still produce some of the finest and most well-regarded art to this day. If the value of an image is in how much work went into it, how much of it was "buit" by the author, then surely any photograph must inherently have little value because they are usually a simple capture of an existing scene in the real world, one which the artist (the photographer) often had no influence on or part in constructing. Was Ansel Adams' work less meaningful because he did not help create Yosemite?
- Oshyan