I remember seeing one of the comments on the FF6 remake that the old SNES ages well because it lacked the technology to show you that the characters look like they're on crack when drawn by Amano since it's just sprites. When they try to remake it for the PSX you got enough polygons to tell the people look like they're on crack. I think it's the same thing with aging well. The fact is that your graphics has to be pretty ghetto so that you can just say 'oh well let's just pretend the graphics isn't there', because if it's any better you'd be reminded that the graphics totally sucks.
Besides, 2D graphics really haven't improved much since the SNES days. Yes there's cell shading and stuff, but really if you want something that looks like a sprite-based game it's not going to look much better than it did 10 years ago, so you don't have as high a standard to hold it against.