Give us some concrete examples to discuss and dissect

I personally find normal mapping extremely useful, you can archive extreme amounts of detail with minimum bandwidth, though you have give the gpu a resource. But yeah, sometimes I do agree with you, artists do sometimes overuse normal mapping when unnecessary, which can actually worsen the final render.

But that's just my opinion.

My observation is that normal mapping is nowhere near as bad as it was years ago. In common with any technique, when it's new there's a "wow factor", just having that technique on it's own is viewed as sufficient, and it tends to be overdone in order to emphasise the fact that a game has it. We saw this with coloured lighting too.

Regarding your other points and examples, the best effects are subtle: they look like a natural part of the scene, you tend not to notice them, and everything looks coherent and consistent. Unfortunately this doesn't translate as "good graphics" in the minds of many players; many players want to be able to see that you're using bloom, DOF, motion blur, etc, and an effect that just combines naturally with the scene doesn't let them see it. This has the ironic effect of cases where effort going into making a natural effect leads to players complaining that a game doesn't have that effect; example: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1445048-does-id-studio-let-you-inprove-the-graphics/

Either way you can't win, it seems.

You haven't said what's wrong with any of those pictures

And yes, I perfectly well understand why the normal mapping looks bad in these screenshots (and many many many more), but here's the lesson:

It's their mistake of putting it into the game without having it up to par with "baked" approximations which are at least bearable to the eye.

Ideally, it would look the same as if you were simply using the high-poly model, except with a blockier silhouette. Normal mapping on its own is just a way to fake higher polygon counts (while also putting the information from those polygons through the texture filter to reduce aliasing).

Are you saying that these devs have used normal mapping, but have also chosen not to bake static shadows/lighting into their diffuse textures?

And yes, I perfectly well understand why the normal mapping looks bad in these screenshots (and many many many more), but here's the lesson:

It's their mistake of putting it into the game without having it up to par with "baked" approximations which are at least bearable to the eye.