Personally, I can't disagree with what you are saying here because it is a wide open subject.Jack, you are mixing what you personally enjoy in a print and the underlying concept of viewing distance. You like a print with lots of detail and have the fun of looking into that. And because of the concepts behind viewing distance, you can achieve that. And if you really understand the concepts of viewing distance, you can really manipulate the viewers experience. Not all photographers are interested in that. To say what I like in a photography is X and then X is the only way photographs can be made is just going too far.
BTW, I never said the detail is not important or irrelevant. This conversation always gets into a polarized points of view. Neither of which I am subscribing to--detail is everything or detail is irrelevant. My point is that image size does not change an image and print size is not limited to pixel resolution. That is it. I am not saying you should not have any particular number of pixels in an image. If you want to limit your print sizes, that is a personal choice. It is not a limit in photography.
I think the viewing distance can come into play, but need not be the over-arching determiner of print size ... however, that can heavily depend on the artist's intent.
For example, Stieglitz printed his "Equivalents" gallery work quite small to force the viewer into a more intimate relationship with his art. Conversly, the show of Annie Leibovitz's work I saw at the International Center of Photography in NY featured huge prints from her RZ film shots, and people went right up to the ropes to view them, and so did I .... the effect was a "larger than life" psychological effect.
Reality based photography seems to beg for as much detail as can be had ... not that a realistic landscape image needs to be viewed from 6 inches away, but that even at a distance we precieve such detail as part of the impression of "tonal reality." The details turn into tonal gradations at a distance, and our eye-brain knows it. After all, God ain't working in digital, His stuff is continuous tone all the way.
As primarily a people shooter, I find a very similar thing happening with skin tones. While more resolution tends to be seen as too perfect for human skin ... that isn't necessarily true ... lighting is what makes that true. What more resolution gives you is smoother continuous tone transitions to mimic living skin that is lit well.
- Marc