you are right, there is a weird grainy sharpness kind of 'feeling' when chroma is not subsampled...
but you get the exact same effect from higher resolutions, e.g. going from SD->HD->2K->4K we see the same thing... and we are still doing it, so i would question highly that it is subjectively better in a long-term sense given this continuing trend.
i remember hearing people discuss this sort of thing when HD was new, and they stopped after while - i suspect because they got used to it, and they now realise how low the quality of the SD image was. i noticed this in myself as well...
its seems either nobody or very few are taking the perspective that 4:2:0/4:2:2 looks better, and there are even a few descriptions of precisely what they notice as being worse.
but you get the exact same effect from higher resolutions, e.g. going from SD->HD->2K->4K we see the same thing... and we are still doing it, so i would question highly that it is subjectively better in a long-term sense given this continuing trend.
i remember hearing people discuss this sort of thing when HD was new, and they stopped after while - i suspect because they got used to it, and they now realise how low the quality of the SD image was. i noticed this in myself as well...
edit: incidentally there is a discussion about this here (first google thing i found): http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1308591
its seems either nobody or very few are taking the perspective that 4:2:0/4:2:2 looks better, and there are even a few descriptions of precisely what they notice as being worse.