I dont understand this logic. Witcher 3 cost $81 million to make. the in house team was 240 people but a lot of work was contracted out. Over 1500 people were involved in the production.
by comparison, Horizon cost $50 million and the first three uncharteds cost $20 million each. Sucker Punch made Infamous Second Son with 100 people. Sony Bend only just hit a 100 people recently and managed to create something like this.
And the point isnt that the Witcher doesnt look as good as other games, it's that it DID look as good as the other games BEFORE it was downgraded. They changed the entire rendering engine a year before the game came out. PS4 and X1 devkits were out a full year before they revealed the trailer. So this means two things. One they knew the specs were too low for their vision and showed the trailer a year later knowing it was going to get massively downgraded. Two, as we can see from other games that have launched since and came out around the same time, the graphics were definitely possible on these consoles and they just downgraded the engine instead of sticking with it and making it work like everyone else did.