Every midjourney image has the same feeling to it. A bit 1950s sci-fi artist. I guess it's just that it all looks airbrushed? I can't put my finger on it.
I don't know if that was Midjourney's intent, but it seems like a smart approach. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and generating quite a lot of ugly garbage, you get consistently good-looking stuff in a certain style. I'm sure it helps their business model.
Feels like it's the Instagram model for prompt-generated images.
Anyone can get a camera phone, take a picture and use some free software (e.g. gimp) to get great results in post-processing.
Most non-expert users though want to click on a few pre-defined filters, find one they like & run with it, rather than having more control yet poorer results (precisely because they _aren't_ experts).
If Midjourney applies this to all their artwork then maybe it alleviates some of the ethical concerns (Midjourney then has a "style" independent of the training data)
I've played a lot with it lately and that just not true. If you play with styles, colors, angles, views you have a lot of control about how the imagine will look. It can emulate pretty much all mainstream aesthetics.