because a game looking good sells your game to casuals better than a game performing well. casuals = $$$ and that's who Rockstar has been targeting with GTA V.

They do care about looks though and guess who Rockstar cares more about? Core gamers or ca$ual$?

Show me people who said 1080p made games better then anything else?  Also casuals do know 1080p is a well known term now.  It is not 2001. Why are you so bitter?   Games revolve around tech that's a fact of life.  Nothing wrong with wanting progress. 

People spend 400 bucks on a console are allowed to prefer the same game at 1080p versus 900 or 720p on another system,  especially those who own both. 

I can still recall the moment when I realized that something was wrong with GTA V: the moment that I got a 'mission passed' screen from simply purchasing a mask. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. That's when I realized much of the game is little more than glorified button prompts. Missions that told me where to drive to on a map so that I could listen to the guy riding shotgun yammer story in my ear. After that I'd sit and watch a cutscene and then wait for a guy to tell me when to fire my sniper rifle while he continued to yammer story in my ear. The whole torture sequence in one of the missions, that had scant gameplay in it. It was just button prompts, what challenge exists there? Little to none. The torture sequence was put there for the sake of getting some controversy and controversy helps sell a game. Considering the lengths Rockstar will go to sell their game (benches, billboards, sides of buses, faces of buildings), I wouldn't doubt it. It was marketing, not good game design philosophy that decided on that mission.

GTA 5 is great from a technical level and this upgrade to 1080p will surely impress many but from a game design perspective, it's still horribly uninspired. I need to go play San Andreas again to see if perhaps this is just me growing jaded or if indeed GTA is becoming just a means to an end: Rockstar's bank account.

No need to point anyone specific, keep reading forums there's plenty of people trying to "boycut" games because the resolution of certain games don't meet their prerequisite.

I'm not bitter at all. In fact, I find this entertaining. I want progress as much as anyone but I'm not going to talk crap about a game not being the next benchmark pusher.

So you cannot post any proof.... Says it all.  Sounds like your sour one system does it better then the other.  3 fanatics on a forum don't me mean squat. A lot of crazy are on forums.  Pointing out forum hyperbole is silly means nothing.