"Evidently, even some retro game enthusiasts want to get rid of pixels so badly that they would rather have a computer smear the art like runny makeup than appreciate the pixel art for what it is."
This guy here. This guy right fucking here. He says what I've been saying for the better part of a decade and a half about all these shitty smoothing algorithms. You're trying to smooth something that was never intended to be smoothed in the first place.