People seem to always forget that the people making those 32 bit and arcade sprites back in th day... got to cut their teeth on YEARS of making NES, SNES, Genesis, and Arcade games beforehand.
It's no surprise that the pixelartist of today wanna get their chance to start learning from a point where they actually have a CHANCE to make a few hundred pictures for all the characters and animations in the game. Many are doing these things alone, or in very small groups.
Even the professional artist of the time started to "cheat" with those glorious spritework games. The backgroundswould start to become pre-rendered rather than hand drawn, polygonal enemies were added in, special effects became pre-rendered particles rather than hand-drawn, hand-animated ones...
Personally, I rarely care which sprite style people use, when they also shove the best quality animaton they can into the style. The Secret of Grindea stuff looks fantastic, even if it's color palette isn't much more than an SNES game at points:
Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds just came out recently, and straddles a line right between the 8-bit they claim to have, and the more 32-bit era attacks and animations:
Even Super Time Force, with it's actually-retro looking sprites, manages to look much more detailed and defined than the era it's graphics claim to be from. They also use Ragdoll animation of the sprites upon death, to really give you those dramatic kills for your ain characters:
Special mention to Sully: A VERY SERIOUS RPG, coming to Computers and Vita this summer; I'm glat to see an RPG that attempts these kinds of graphics for battles:
I think it's great how much these smaller companies do with obviously limited resources and budgets. These games don't get the kind of attention they used to, and we're not in a race to impress anyone with the largest sprites (lacking animation) like we were back then.