The opposite is true. ANTIC/GTIA are pretty much straight forward with only few possibilities to exploit features while the VIC2 is the most exploited gfx chip that I know.
Looking through the games library I see a huge number of games with 4 color background. 4 colors looks always like 4 colors, no matter if they are picked from a 128 color palette or 16 color palette.
The reason is that gfx people normally avoid technical stuff. They just want to set pixels, and if you just want to set pixels without knowing much of the technical background, the A8 is pretty much limited to 4 colors @ 160x200 resolution.