When you said polish is a cover for having nothing to say, that hit home. I read something similar in a music blog last week. They said modern tools let you fix everything, so the mistakes get erased but so does the character. It becomes too safe and loses its edge. Like those old jazz records, the limits forced creativity, not just cleanup.

Feel this a lot with how everything gets turned into content now. I mean, even calm stuff needs a hype edit or a voiceover explaining why it's calm. It's like we can't just let things be simple and boring in a good way. Maybe it's just me but I see it with music too, where old recordings have that raw sound and new ones are so polished they lose something. Those factory tapes hit different because they're not trying to be anything, they just are.