[itishappy]

I doubt it's anything nefarious. I think it's due to choosing comparisons based on popularity vs content.

Hubble's visible light Pillars of Creation image, for example, is super famous and instantly recognizable, but I'm not sure I would have known what I was looking at if the infrared version was used.

Also, different devices rarely have exactly the same usage and specifications. For example, Webb and Hubble have very different wavelength sensitivities, and this has tradeoffs in resolution and quality. In other words, the subjective image quality you get from the pictures may not tell the whole story of how valuable the data itself is.