Please, don't feel patronized; but liking the aesthetics of a particular sound or sound design is not the same as quality in sound render or sound design.
True Combat 1.x is an excellent case in point; you may not have liked Race's 1.0 sounds, but technically they were consistent, congruent, and worked well with the limitations of of the Q3A. Granted his sounds were not SOTA samples and the reverb he used was pretty low quality stuff; but his work was much better then the inconsistent mud slide that was made of in in 1.2 with different reverb on virtually every sound, different scale perspectives on different weapons, savagely kludgey and crude radio emulation... In essence no technical improvement, just someone monkeying around with someone else's work to make something he liked better.
There are means to both satisfying both the game production goals for a particular aesthetic whether it be some sort of action realism intensity, very scale realistic sound, or dramatic totally mutated sonic hyperbola -- and have a consistent world object, weapon sounds.
In FPS gaming weapon sounds are very important both aesthetically and technically as they are the chief instrument of interactivity in the genera. I won't belabor the technical -- but suffice to say that fuxered and dystopic reverb effects, improper scale etc. can and do have an effect on game balance and how games are played as well has how they are perceived.
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