I don't agree that you can separate graphics and art like if one has nothing to do with the other. Graphics are nothing without art.
Let's take one of the subjects that you pointed out: lighting. How can a team make good looking lighting without understanding how light affects things on an artistic level?
As an example let's take GT Sport. IMO this game has the most photorealistic lighting on any game to date, and that's is not because of the raw power of the PS4, but because PD and Kaz (that is a photographer) have an amazing artistic understanding of how lighting works. They have nailed lighting since the PS One days.
It's very easy. Consider this (with a grain of salt, it's been 8 years since I looked into this): last gen, one of the ways we knew the Xbox 360 was a more powerful console than the Playstation 3 was because the Xbox 360 could do both dynamic and volumetric lighting simultaneously. Alan Wake was literally not capable of running on a PS3 because the PS3 couldn't handle the kind of lighting Alan Wake was pulling off. It was capable of running games with dramatically higher draw distances than PS3 games (Halo Reach had a 34 mile draw distance, and Alan Wake was pretty much effortlessly rendering a bunch of stuff it could have culled), which is also related to lighting.
You can do artistic things with lighting to make a game look good, and I think Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio both did wonderful jobs with lighting last gen, but there is also lighting ~technology~ (that is, graphics stuff) that the 360 could do because it was the more powerful console, having a GPU that was a half or full graphics generation ahead of the PS3 (plus it had a unified RAM pool, which helped it in games that were RAM heavy, like Bethesda titles).
I can make a beautiful painting with watercolor, but if I want to print a photo, I'm going with an inkjet printer.
You can make beautiful, artistic games, but if you're going for "best graphics," we're talking technology. It's objective at that point. Obviously Digitalfoundry's gonna have opinions on that, and I'd be interested in what they have to say. But I suspect they won't be like "wow, God of War has one million polys per character, the most any game has ever pushed" or "holy shit, real time global illumination with raytracing! incredible!"
Like, if this thread was "God of War is the best looking game on the Playstation," I'd probably just nod my head. But obviously while I'm doin my 'eat breakfast and browse forums' thing, I'm gonna pop in and go "hey, I disagree with this." I've said what I needed to say tho. I'm not here to harsh anyone's vibes about this being a good looking game. But to say the best... I mean, it's like telling me that a Dodge Viper is the fastest car in the world. It's patently false. I don't see why popping it in and going "you know there are faster cars, right?" is a big deal.
