Which argument? The main issue discussed in this thread is that Microsoft is advertising features with supposedly in-game footage, and those features don’t actually exist in the game. Or did you just mean the ill informed XBox comment that ExpressTomato was responding to?
The few locations where they manually added aerial imagery of shallow water detail doesn’t excuse the dozens of other locations they’re showing off that don’t have it. It’s false advertising to say this scenery is in the game when it actually isn’t.
In my opinion, a bigger issue is that it’s misleading in how the game works in general. They show off these locations, so one might naturally think that they’ve included broad and diverse scenery for tropical shallows. But then when you actually hop in the Icon, you discover that the shallow seas are largely featureless and empty, and that this scenery is only available at a handful of select locations, and not even in most of the locations actually being advertised.
The screen shots from ExpressTomato are pretty, but that’s about the extent of the substance they represent: pretty screen shots. That’s why there are always replies like, “Where is that? I don’t see anything like that when I fly”.
It’s computationally inexpensive, and other titles have been doing it for years. There’s no other scenery at that spot requiring attention from the GPU anyway. That’s why I was surprised to see the water in this state in a “next gen” sim that shipped with a seaplane. I just hope that they don’t invest so much in manually adding blending masks that they’re dissuaded from a long term solution, which will effectively undo all of their work.