It sure does not. My concern is that in this research they correlate the amount of crunch with quality of a game and show that "better" games have statistically

It sure does not. My concern is that in this research they correlate the amount of crunch with quality of a game and show that "better" games have statistically less crunch. Since I know the games, considered successful in the industry, all have a lot of crunch, it sounds like they use their own criteria for quality, which has nothing to do with the common meaning.