I don't think your separation into 'technical IQ' and 'artistic IQ' is useful at all. 'IQ' as people use it is not useful, because it is completely subjective and undefined, yet people want to use it as though it is an objective, quantitative thing. Surely, there are many images which don't depend for their impact on image quality, and even some which depend on image qualities which would normally be considered poor, such as flare or even, sometimes, noise.
Or it could be the 'wrong' (or rather lack of) colors in a b&w image, and how about shallow DoF, which seriously decreases the total amount of detail. And maybe optical flaws like vignetting and soft corners also sometimes can increase the 'artistic quality' of an image.
A photo is simply information, and how that information is presented in the photo often has a tremendous amount to do with the effect it will have. In other words, the goal isn't to present as much information as you can, but to have as much information as possible to begin with to increase your options with presentation.
So, yes, we can take all the information related to color out of a photo to enhance its impact, but that does not mean that we would want to begin with a grayscale capture, unless we knew in advance that we wanted a BW photo and a grayscale sensor increased other elements of IQ (e.g. resolution, noise, etc.).
Agree that more options is a good thing (would be nice if we also could adjust DoF afterwards), but nevertheless some choose to start out with a B&W (LF) image with rather low technical IQ :
http://sallymann.com/family-pictures
She's quite the photographer, is she not? However, I'm thinking the "technical IQ" is not necessarily so low. The tonality of the prints is likely remarkable.
But, yes -- no color, motion blur, OOF -- in short, a whole glut of technical "flaws" yet her photos make the grade and then some.
Would her photos have been better without the technical "flaws"? I can't really say, but probably not. I have a few such photos myself, which I think are succesful not because of their technical flaws, but in spite of them:
http://www.pbase.com/joemama/iqirrelevantphotos
However, it may well be that some, or all, are successful because of the technical flaws instead of in spite of them.
An example I love to point to is this one:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=39831113
where we have two pics of the same scene, one with much lower IQ than the other. Yet, the high IQ is not "better than" the low IQ pic, it's simply different.
The thing is, though, that the photographer had the option for either and/or both with equipment that can deliver high IQ.
So, while a photographer can certainly make a career of stunning low IQ photos (as you demonstrated), it's nice to have the option.
Then again, the argument put forth by many of advocates for primes is that not having the ability to zoom "forces" the photographer to be more creative. On the other hand, I shoot primes exclusively, and find this lack of versatility annoying, if anything.
So, it all comes back to this:
I suppose what you're saying is that a 'quality image' does not always depend on 'image quality', and I would not disagree with that.
Those sound like the words of a remarkably intelligent fellow, who, I imagine, is ridiculously good looking as well.
and, I guess, we can include that, for at least some photographers, less is more.
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