He actually addresses why he won't solve any of the "problems" with more manpower. He's found local maxima and is willing to stay there because there are risks associated with moving.
Then say that instead of "Jeff needs an art director", which literally means that Jeff needs an art director. Which means another employee. It doesn't mean "Jeff needs to be an art director". Which he is, but results in the current situation where his games have the art they have, people complain, he writes an article explaining, and people like you criticize him for reasonable justification for why things are the way things are.
Then again, the older I get, the more I think the same should apply to developers. You should never lock knowledge inside one person's head, but the idea that you can take over a project without its original creators doing a years long hand off is naive, and leads to all the expected pathologies.
I remember a new $250k CTO saying he was amazed our code didn't have abandoned parts nobody wanted to touch ... this is how professionals are supposed to work, not something they discover "late" in their career.
It's actually really common. Most games take years to make and in my experience at least it's very unusual to ship with the same team that started. Art is also the side of things that most readily gets outsourced, either through bought and modified assets or through freelancers and outsourcing companies. Maintaining consistency is something that has to be managed.
You're saying this like this was one of his design goals from the very beginning when he started 25 years ago. No, it's become a requirement because of how unreliable freelancers can be and how difficult it is to find a replacement that is able or willing to stick to the previous style. Thus generic fantasy stuff has become his solution to this issue that is unavoidable, regardless of whether people agree with him or not.
I mean the guy seems incapable of comprehending style if this is what he's putting out 25 years in.
I see all this criticism here and I don't see any real solutions that would, on a realistic, concrete level, help him in any way improve his business.
It looks worse than his previous games, so he's gotten worse with time.
I don't think his liking his games art is a reason not to comment with my take on his blog post about it though.
When you care about art, you usually got some sense of aesthetics and feel more likely unable to bring yourself to ship anything that looks simply bad to yourself.
When you don't got the eyes to see bad art as what it is, you also won't see it as a problem that really needs fixing so you care less about it than is good for you.
You have to strike a balance there. Games are visual independend of the style. Yes you play them – but before you even decide to pick a game up, you see screenshots, trailers or game-play-videos. If that doesn't look interesting, you can have the most interesing gameplay in the universe and it wouldn't sell.
A bit like in films, where the best script can be destroyed by bad acting or the best acting can be destroyed by bad scripts as a passionate creator you have to realize that this is a serious issue.
Amateur filmmakers might figure out directing techniques to get top notch acting out of people who never stood in front of a camera before or they might search very patiently till somebody crosses their way who is a natural talent.
The thing is to precisely know your limitations and do the best you can do within them, sometimes even by not copying the best, but by finding glorious short cuts that sometimes create whole new genres.
... then you will also be very bad at hiring a good art director. You could easily end up hiring somebody who is really bad and you wouldn't know.
Even with all the money that Microsoft had in the 90'ies, they couldn't make Windows look good.
If he also cares about art more, then the other thing he cares about, namely; his one family, are denied that time.
Everything costs something.