@matt
I don't think it's an unpopular opinion at all.
Things were way stricter because when submitting gold, factories would start to press discs/cartridges and distribute manually. This was expensive.
This is a way more delicate issue if you used a buggy build. Sometimes, it had catastrophic consequences (I remember Myth II's discs breaking PCs when being uninstalled).
So, having better standards was actually a necessity, an obligation, compared to now.