In my opinion, using Spine to animate characters is both an artistic decision and a production decision, because Spine makes it easier to animate characters and the whole animation process becomes less expensive when compared to animating everything by hand.
The side effect of that “bones” technique is that you always get jointed paper dolls:
Some people like it, others don’t, and other immediately associate that kind of guided/restricted movements to the desire of simplifying the animation process and reducing costs. An economic aspect does exists, so I’m not surprised that some people can make an association between it and the ending visual results.
What I think it’s not possible to do, @St_Eddie , is comparing different games without having information about budget and other socioeconomic aspects. Given my background, the argument “more or less the budget is the same, so the visual result was affected only by the artistic choices” seems to cut out a lot of important information and I’m afraid that accepting this simplification might mislead us all.
For start, when it comes to budgets and economics, the meaningful information that we should have would be numbers, currencies and in which years the production happens. Without actual numbers, we know nothing.
Moreover, we don’t know how the RtMI budget was allocated and how it compares to other games. We don’t know if reducing the costs of the animation process was useful to achieve other goals that the developers decided were more important to reach.
Hours of playtime, for example. So, yeah, I see a paper doll effect that personally I don’t like, but maybe choosing it contributed to achieve X hours more of playtime for me. Is that good for me? I have no idea, I have to wait for the game to decide if those X hours were hours of enjoyment or hours of torture. 
Also, it’s not correct to assume that all companies and projects face the same amount of costs. How much people are payed varies quite a lot between different countries and jurisdictions. This has also an effect on companies that have their employees or contractors in different countries: some companies take advantage of these inter-country differences, while other companies don’t feel comfortable in paying some employees less, only because life costs less in the country where they live.
Finally, and this is an aspect that should never be forgotten, sometimes it’s possible to achieve a result or achieving it in a shorter time (again, an aspect that affects economics) at the expense of some employees and their well-being. They can be crunched or squeezed as much as possible and that’s an hidden cost, invisible to players. We, again, have no idea if this is the case for the game productions that we would like to compare.
All these aspects are usually intermingled. It’s extremely unlikely that any aspect isn’t influenced by the others.
So, is it theoretically possible for a production team to do the same of better of other production teams? I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. Were there the conditions to achieve something similar? Until we have more information… who knows?
It’s up to us to decide how much information we want to base a comparison upon, but we need to be aware that if we cut a large quantity of key data we run the risk of transforming complex items into apples and oranges.
That’s why, in more formal contexts, consultants usually refuse to provide an opinion without assessing internal data. From an external point of view they can only see the result, not why it happened.
Do I expect people on the Internet to wait for information before providing an opinion? Of course, no. That would kill 99% of the discussions. 
But I also think that every now and then it’s useful to point out that we know almost nothing and that in accepting excessive simplifications there is a risk of deluding ourselves.
