Good hacks of today put in a lot of personal effort from the hacker to be good. Quartz, being from a time before you could plug-and-play ASM and scripts and ROMBases and such, put in more personal effort than the good hacks of today. Therefore, Quartz is ahead of its time in that it put in an equal or greater ratio of personal effort than the good hacks of today (in relation to their respective hacking environments).
We have to remember that Quartz happened in a time when nobody really knew how to change palettes and tiles. Most of the things we take for granted today had to be researched and hex edited. UNLZ GBA was the ONLY tool capable of changing compressed graphics and was buggy as hell. We didn't have dynamic offsets for our script editors (so you had to know the size of your scripts and remember where you were putting them), and ScriptEd broke a ton of scripts when it decompiled them so you had to rewrite them before reinserting. I don't believe we had a reliable Trainer editor when Quartz was being developed, though correct me if I'm wrong there. EliteMap was still a viable map editor. EliteMap.
Pokemon Quartz's thread is dated March of 2006. Pokemon Emerald came out in 2004; Ruby and Sapphire came out in 2002. It was still Gen 3 when this was being worked on. And despite the lack of knowledge, it was STILL better than some of the stuff that is being churned out today. It's not good from our high standards of today (but again, still better than some of what's being released now), but it was amazing and completely ahead of its time when compared to its contemporaries (of which there were very very few) back in 2006.
Seriously, if people don't think Quartz was ahead of its time, fight me. I was there. We have members on the board who are younger than Quartz is and 90% of us (including myself as, again, I was there) would be completely unable to do what Quartz did if dropped in that era and could only use that era's knowledge.
