There's no such thing as a codec that looks good or bad in an absolute sense. Codecs boil down to a quality versus bitrate curve. And starving them always looks bad.

While the most common kind of artifact will shift between standards, significant artifacts are fundamentally bitrate issues or encoder bugs.

If you gave DVD levels of bits-per-pixel to MPEG-4 ASP you could get something that looks nearly perfect.

> just in a relative sense compared to the alternatives of the era

This is common sense. Nobody thinks the original iPhone is revolutionary today, but they do think it was revolutionary for the time.

At 1024x768, compared to my Nokia 14" CRT TV it looked good enough.