Hard disagree. The accessibility and availability of free resources is higher than ever before for solo devs. AAA games take large teams because they have more content, and a larger diversity of content than older games.

> Instead of focusing on graphical fidelity I think we should be focusing on lower development time, gameplay features/diversity, stability/portability and implementation. I have yet to see a proper open world game (Think GTA but you can enter every room in every building) with good draw distances that don't suffer from horrible pop in.

That's because it's a difficult problem and machines don't have unlimited resources. Draw distances are a graphical fidelity problem, so I also find it ironic that this is your first idea.

> I have yet to see a proper open world game (Think GTA but you can enter every room in every building) with good draw distances that don't suffer from horrible pop in.

I don't think these are compatible. The majority of man-hours are spent creating graphics, not programming features.

Technically, yes but it's not as heavily swayed as you might think. On the four AAA projects I've worked on, it's been roughly 60-40 art to programming/technical design (think level scripters). There is definitely a sizeable amount of the man hours spent by engineers writing C++

Hard disagree here.

So if you divide it up, how much work is done to support the art and graphics of the game, and how much is done to support the gameplay, you get a much greater ratio art to game than 60/40.