As someone who has no horse in the race between the PS4 Pro's 4Kish or the Scorpio's supposed true 4K, I have made the following observation: the importance of resolution for some seems to ebb and flow depending on which side has the technological advantage. During the PS360 era a few hundred pixels of resolution difference were apparently a huge deal and clearly better for 360 owners while PS3 gamers claimed that games looked mostly the same. Then the next generation started and suddenly native 1080p was of paramount importance for PS4 owners and anything less looked like crap, while xbox one owners had an epiphany that a slightly fuzzier look isn't such a big deal. Now with the Pro and Scorpio we have a reversal once again. Non-native 4k is fine now because of new techniques and the amount of pixels, while next year it will not be fine because it's not native and it will look like shit. This sort of constant goalpost moving is both funny and sad, in my opinion.
You have a point, that does happen. I will say though, native will always be superior to any other technique that mimicks it. However the way it was done in the past was just through an upscale either by your tv or the console which had untold artefacts, blurring and smudged detail.
However, right now ,there is hardware that mitigates such issues and it's something that was carefully planned and tackled whilst developing the console; (checkerboarding with TAA, id buffer, DCC, the primitive discard accelerator, multiple wavefronts on CU's including utilization of halfloat operations), are all newly introduced to consoles to makre rendering at higher resolutions less taxing and to produce a final image that has less artefacts which does not eschew detail. It's a console box, they had to go that route, because there's no way you are putting $1500-2000 worth of hardware in a console to do 4k gaming (for triple AAA) titles in 2016.
People have to understand, that in the Pro's case, it's not goal post moving that people are saying that chekerboarding is really close to native when you see it side by side, rather it's appreciating how much good work Cerny did with the vision he had and the results speak for itself. I've not been against non native entirely as I played many non native games on my 1080p set, but my argument was always get me something looking as good as native and maybe I'll be impressed.
People use to say that Shadowfall's Reprojection was 1080p, but it wasn't, just like checkerboarding is not native, the difference however is in the results. Shadowfall's reprojection would never fool anybody who's into tech that it was native or close, but here, people are mightily impressed with checkerboarding. It's simple really, a system was designed to give results close enough to 4k at a much lower cost and they've succeeded.....I believe checkerboarding to full 2160p as opposed to 1800p will be a sight to behold in future titles. Few titles are doing full on 2160p checkerboarding so far....but there are a few. (I believe Zero Dawn is one).....
Other topic;
As for another topic being discussed earlier in this thread.....Would there not be banding or other artefacts in 10bit or even 12bit color sets. I'm sure if your eyes are trained enough you can always detect some discrepancies. Going from 8bit to 10bit color depth does not mean 10bit color reproduction is perfect in every regard. In a couple of years, people will say "10bit color is shit how could you guys play that way or thought it was all that great", look how much better 16bit CD is or 24bit CD is....Hmmmph......HDR as it is currently, will also improve quite a bit going forward as well......it's just how technology works
In any case, here's a description on the set I highlighted earlier as it relates to 10 bit....
Color Depth Show Help : 10 Bit
The TV accepts a 10 bit input, and displays it smoothly. There are some tints visible in the grayscale, but overall a good result without any banding.