I suppose adding "fidelity" would've made more sense; that user has a habit of framing those who don't like Standards as "expecting perfection" or something similar. Of course, ignoring that Kaz himself has said something to that effect...
It really shouldn't be unreasonable to expect a higher quality of assets than what I was presented with fifteen years ago. But, to clarify my point; a livery editor won't be able to work identically between the two tiers - not really an issue of visual quality by itself, but about giving the user increased personalization options. Any hopes of an accurate, realistic damage model that takes into affect aerodynamics (even at simplified levels) are dashed with the current Standards. Actually, not just damage; piece-meal body kit application isn't really possible either, though I'll admit, I'm unsure if changing a bumper actually has any affect whatsoever on cars currently in GT6. Headlights and wipers aren't treated the same across both tiers.
Interior view, while certainly a graphical shortcoming, also does have an effect on gameplay for many players.
There's nothing wrong with expecting it in principle. Expecting it when we've been told we're not getting it is another thing entirely.
The livery editor is, practically speaking, non-existent. We don't know how it works. I'd personally do it in a way that was totally agnostic as to the underlying geometry, and that's also the way an editor would be most intuitive to use. It's possibly unlikely PD would waste time on optimising for low-res geometry, should such a thing persist, or should such "optimisation" prove necessary. If the reason the Standard cars didn't get number stickers in the recent update is because they didn't want to spend the time manually placing them all, then we may be in luck; if it's because the method used to render them is incompatible with their geometry, we're probably not going to get a livery editor for Standards. Then again, dirt sticks to Standards just as it does Premiums...
The damage model will never
realistically affect aero, outside of fudges, for the foreseeable future, certainly not in real time. Those fudges could as easily apply to the Standards just the same. Of course, "aero damage" is relevant only to a small sub-section of cars and play styles, and strikes me as potentially being a somewhat sensitive area on the issue of "brands". Good to have, but I think it's unlikely to be anything but generic if implemented. The only thing that will really suffer is the visual representation of damage, unless tessellation can be leveraged, or if the Semi-Premium treatment spreads significantly.
The body parts are generally mere visual detail, they do not affect performance at all (except the "flat-floors", which aren't visually represented or available on all Premiums, and don't seem to work properly in the game anyway - oh, and the carbon bonnets, which are on some Standards, too). Even if they did affect performance, they needn't be visually represented, much as most of the modifications already aren't - the effort is in configuring all the cars in the game to have these parts. Any expectation that future games might have more visual representation of mods is probably wishful thinking; there are other places this is more appropriate and easily / efficiently achievable. Besides, Standards (and large car counts in general) seem most popular with those who don't modify their cars much, if at all.
The headlights' effect on the environment, and their controls, are the same between tiers now, there's just no visual representation on the Standard cars' exteriors; but the wipers are a strange one, I'll admit. It might be related to the black-frame, no bodywork interior views of the Standards, despite the GTPSP "version" of the view having visible exterior parts. I'm drawn to the issue of geometry culling and backface rendering; perhaps the PSP could use a screen-space method thanks to its low res and (relatively) high bandwidth. Or maybe it's the moving viewpoint (screen shake etc.) on PS3 that's messing things up.
There is an aesthetic concern with the interior view discrepancy, which does lead to a difference in experience for those who rely on it. I'm not convinced the black frame is functionally that inferior, though. But then I don't care for a cockpit view since it doesn't work very well with a narrow field of view, so it's all functionally inferior to me. We'll see what horrors an HMD unearths with Standard interiors soon enough!
I'm surprised nobody mentioned physics, though! Surprised, but thankful.
. The whole pros/cons, fors/againsts standards thing is just going too far. There's been about 6,000 of these threads now and it's always the same argument each time. Half the people want them, half the people don't and it's purely laziness that PD are putting them in the next game because quantity is apparently better than quality... I mean, who would want 8 pristine Skylines, one representing each era of the car when you can have 46 jagged, mix-matched ones of 3 different qualities just to make a car list longer than The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy..? 
