I agree, — Long live the pixel art!
But if I could explain my other reasoning for going that route: I am a huge fan of well animated games such as Earthworm Jim, Another World, and Aladdin on the Genesis. More recently, I've been inspired by the games of Wayforward Studio (Namely The Brave and the Bold (DS), Alien: Infestation (DS), and Mighty Switchforce (3DS). Those games are beautiful to look at and have a very fluid look.
Since I'm only one person, I have to come up with techniques to produce a lot of animation quickly. Most of these are using Flash or After Effects to bend and rotate things to give the illusion of movement with very little effort. When you shrink that down in Photoshop, it seems less obvious that I'm using tricks. Here's an example of using the puppet tool to bend and deform the limbs in an idle animation.
[TUBE]S6a6MmpVuD4[/TUBE]