I’m inclined to agree. It follows the same logic as designing architecture to serve the needs of avatars rather than realistic humans.

It is the case, however, that textures already being used in a build can often by stretched and colours to simulate things such as bark, flowing water, lava, melting wax et cetera. Designers too often fail to experiment with texture reuse and instead just slap another large download on us.

I’ve come to hate fire prims, the prims with fire pictures taken from RL pasted on them, to simulate flames. There are griefers that massivey shoot them out of guns all over sims, where they hang for weeks on the parcels of no-shows.

I’m leaning more toward liking particle fires more these days. To me, particles, by their nature, are of the world, are of the simulated synthetic world and therefore “feel natural” and “are in harmony” with this synthetic nature, odd as that may sound. Pictures carted from RL, with its different physics and values, and pasted into SL, always feel fake to me.