I can accept that And when I disagree I'll try harder to stick to the points I disagree on rather than apparent contradictions. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, especially when one of the contradictions regards something I have a strong opinion about, and I'm sure you can understand that.

I think perhaps it's important to distinguish between "better" and "good". It might well be that Primer, for example (a movie with no CGI), is the best movie ever and no movie can ever be better. That's great. But there's only so much we can do without CGI, and CGI lets us do more. Because there are still good movies to be made without CGI, some films are still strictly live-action. And because people get excited about CGI, some films are techdemos for CGI. But there are also excellent films out there that wouldn't be possible without CGI, and I'm grateful for this, even if for some hypothetical reason they're never better than live-action movies can be.

I think you'll agree that that's a good analogy, with sprite-based games being our live action movies -- there are still good sprite based games to be made, even though there are less restrictive technologies available. Games are often tech-demos of new technologies more than they are well-designed games. But there are excellent games that wouldn't be possible without 3D, and there will (I'm sure) be excellent games that wouldn't be possible without voxels (or a similar volumetric representation of things).

So yes, voxels are at risk of being abused (and are already being abused, as far as we can see in this video) for their novelty. But they also let designers who can look past the novelty of new techniques re-think what limitations they have as game designers, and what limitations a player should have.