[tripzilch]

I'm inclined to agree with you, but a bunch of common counterexamples immediately spring to mind. Very often, sorting through a huge amount of low quality phone camera pics from a party or something, I encounter a "happy accident" that would have made a great photo if only: it had been properly in focus, not blown out by light, less noisy (especially when you'd normally crop the pic, phone camera grain is way uglier than film grain), or any of those things that'd a medium-quality camera suffers way less from.

Am I wrong? Is the blurry picture possibly just as great (even if you can't recognize my friends' face?), or would it have turned out to be a shitty picture after all, obscured by the lack of focus?

[vertex-four]

Would you have got the details right and taken that particular photo at all if you were paying more attention to each shot? I don't think this has much to do with the camera - if the picture's blurry, you were likely taking it in a hurry, and you would've taken it in a hurry if you had a real camera.