Even without the edit... It was quite clear.

This part gives it away:"But something tells me you know him very, very well."

Nope, Evergreen did not, this was a hardware bug, not a software one.
Keep in mind I had a pair of Radeon 5870's then upgraded to a pair of Radeon 6950's and the difference in some games was actually startling. (In-fact I have had at-least one of ATI's high-end cards starting with the dual-GPU ATI Rage Fury MAXX.)
Anand reported on it here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/amds-radeon-6870-6850-renewing-competition-in-the-midrange-market/5

I'm still not talking about mip-maps.

And are you sure about that? There are some pretty big differences between DXT5 and 3dc+ yet are fully interoperable with each other.

Unfortunatly it takes years for a standard to become ratified, also doesn't help that the market has shifted where the focus is on power consumption rather than performance. (Aka. LDDR3.)

I love the fact the Shin'en seems to be a very intelligent developer and actually cares to put the extra effort in to make a game look and play beautifully. I sure hope this game turns out to be awesome!!

The only thing that's special about them is that they go in depth in their way that they describe what they do with the hardware.

It's not that they do anything special with said hardware...

If other devs would do the same, I doubt people would be as hyped as they are about them.  

I thought what was special with them was that they were good at compression?  Maybe not like "#1 in the world," but nonetheless talented at making it happen.  

Actually, yes they do.

They pushed the GBA, DS, 3DS, and Wii further than almost any other developer. They got normal mapping and global lighting running on Wii at 60fps.

They are one of the most technically capable devs out there.

I would have bet the one to reply in this fashion would be you.

You're way too over enthused by that studio. Start pointing out every technical merits from other studios for a change, and see how other studios achieve just as much if not more. But... They don't go and spell out everything the do with their engines every chance they get, unlike Shin'en, so I doubt you will do it.

What's wrong with liking a studio? They're not even one of my favourites, I wouldn't put them in the same league as Retro, Monolith, Naughty Dog, Platinum, or Tokyo EAD.

I just respect their engineering capabilities, fan engagement, and the way their games remind me of modernized PS1/N64 classics.

Nvidia claims otherwise ... The HD 6000 series did have better texture filtering but there's no such thing as "correct" anisotropic filtering since the whole concept is arbitrary. Nvidia may have handled the transitions better but angle independence is the only one to be able to fix cases like that to this ...

(I hope you didn't listen to guys like this ...) 

Judging from the description, you were ... Changing the texture quality for a surface on the fly implies that it is "mipmapping" in effect. 

Being interoperable makes no difference as long as the compression algorithms support a common surface format. If your wondering about their similarities their both based off of S3TC and 3DC+ only builds upon it. There are no practical differences in terms of conserving memory usage (In fact it's worse when your using an INT8 texture which tons of games use.), the biggest change is increase in accuracy which translates to higher quality and Microsoft THEMSELVES say so ...

The big reason why we're focusing on power consumption rather than performance is for the purpose of exascale and there are better options such as stacked DRAM ...

Might I ask, but what exactly is so special about Shin'en's engineering capabilities ? 

After all, these guys aren't even in the forefront graphical innovations compared to the developers from AAA studio's who show up at SIGGRAPH with their impressive showcases and presentations ... 

Hell, I find the 3 year old work that Cyril Crassin produced at Nvidia more grand than what Shin'en ever did ...