Actually, you could do a game like Xenoblade on the HD consoles and upgrade the graphics a little bit, such as better textures, some shaders for material effects, and slightly better character models.
And what would probably happen is plenty of gamers would compare that to super sampled bullshot beauty pics of Uncharted 3 and go "LOL Japanese can't make real game ha ha!"
One of the problems with the push for technology is that there's no sliding scale for a lot of people because they don't understand how scale works. There ARE plenty of people who gripe that Skyrim looks like shit and wonder why every meter of game world cannot look like Uncharted 3, Crysis 2, etc. Another example I always remember is that when Darksiders came out, I saw more than one comment to the effect of "lol this game is f**king ugly nowhere near as good as God of War III".
Techno-fetishized visual quality has been pushed by the industry as the primary way to sell games at first glance, and probably also conditioned gamers to judge all games purely by how closely they look to motion picture CG of realistic environments and photo-real characters.
From this we get the trend of developers too often falling into the trap of sacrificing everything in order to pack as much visual fidelity in as possible in order to meet those expected targets.
(After all, we already have developers talking about next gen, saying sub-1080p and 30fps is fine because it means more shaders, fuck yeah!)
The troubles that result in a mindless, non-measured push for technology for its own sake are born of an incestuous relationship. The public pushes developers for it, publishers take advantage of it by whipping the public into a frenzy for every game showing off twice the technology of the last game. Ironically, the OP article kind of plays into this by merely demanding "as much technology as possible, pack it all in, it's what we deserve!"
Ironically, a very western attitude :lol: Super size it, gimmie as much as I can eat, damn the consequences, I don't want to hear it, because it's what I deserve.