For the record, the halo 3 ghost has just as much detail and grunge stuff on the diffuse as mine (if not more), the only difference is that it's using a fall-off specular shader, which gives the armour a smooth fresnel effect on the mesh boundaries, giving the metal a clean, yet detailed appeance.

i.e, you judge the shader on material expression, not one bitmap.

If I was to make it "clean" looking for CE, it'd look almost cel shaded, or noob textured. Sorry, not going there.

Find something valid to nitpick over.