My main objection comes from the fact that I do both development and design, and I've seen a lot of developers act like art can be reused just the same as code,

My main objection comes from the fact that I do both development and design, and I've seen a lot of developers act like art can be reused just the same as code, with no ill effects. But humans are excellent pattern matchers, and we do pick up on these things. Personally I mostly enjoy games for their story and atmosphere, and the few times I've recognized a reused asset (e.g. a sound effect) it's been really distracting. It's like the Wilhelm Scream in movies... once you know about it, you can never stop noticing it. A better idea would be to make an open library for procedural generation of assets, so that you can make infinite variations of every item, and tweaking is easy. We already have e.g. SpeedTree, but these things are so valuable they always end up being commercial rather than free.