I think what it really shows up, is that these 20mm figures from Preiser and elsewhere look like real people in miniature, rather than the usually way-too-chunky caricatures we have all been conditioned to love in 28mm 'wargames' figures.
These guys look in perfect proportion. Their anatomy is right. The poses are entirely natural - and relaxed, which of course is something you rarely see in a wargames figure...
Actually, the painting is not that fantastic: it is much more impressionistic than 'accurate' (in the 'three colour method' sense). But that doesn't matter, because it all adds to the sense of realism. Because people are quite impressionistic when you look at them, they are blurs and impressions of colour - not painted in hyper-realistic layers of base, shade and highlight colour...
It's an amazing piece of work, but I'm afraid it rather depresses me, because it reminds me how far we have all come from attempting to accurately portray reality in miniature...
In part at least it's down to a blending of genres between fantasy and historical. Many of us have grown up with squat, cartoony orcs, space marines and the like, and we now unthinkingly accept the absurd anatomical conventions of GW and their imitators in everything we do... This shows us how far we've gone astray.
Right...
Now to order those Lost World dino hunters...