In all likelihood this is largely a case of people forgetting the past. I don't think
Hibike Euphonium looks bad, but a great deal of its visual quality is muddied behind the bizarre artistic choice to heavily blur elements of the foreground background. It's honestly claustrophobic, a device being used with little to no restraint or thought.
As a studio Kyoto Animation have a knack for creating highly detailed environments for scenes, and these small details pop, add color, and create an astounding sense of space as these details act as recognizable anchors to assist in creating a sound spatial logic to scenes. Multiple objects create more reference points, additionally assisting in scale. These can be essential to tying individual shots together, as dynamic viewpoints can be pieced together into a larger picture just through shared background language.
Hyouka and
Tamako Love Story are both wonderful examples of this tactic, which is part of why the worlds within feel so well realized.
There is one KyoAni directer who hasn't really grasped this concept very well though: Ishihara.
Euphonium is another example in his catalogue that fails to utilize anywhere near the full potential of the background work KyoAni are capable of. There's loads of washed out backgrounds with digital blur that push all focus on to the characters, and eventually it feels exceedingly repetitive with the world itself fading into nothingness. It doesn't help that
Euphonium is targeting its excessively detailed backgrounds to single
nearly CG style stills that don't get fleshed out with multiple shots while letting the commonly used settings, such as the main music room, kind of languish in a simply detailed state.
