[tdumitrescu]

It wasn't just coding, it was also a lot of design/art resources. Going from 256->16 colors would look terrible with automatic dithering. My recollection is that there were a few Sierra titles made for VGA that also supported EGA and that it looked like someone had gone through each screen by hand to make the low-color ones look acceptable-ish.

[the_af]

EGA art specifically designed for EGA could look beautiful. For example, I love EGA Monkey Island. Most adventures with EGA support had different graphics for EGA vs VGA.

But yeah, automatic dithering didn't look nice.