I typically engage with some niche things I find critical that people don't care for. And after a bunch of work I end up with something subtle. And people just see it as okay and wonder what's the point.
On my way to make HL2 look like HL1, so far I came up with brightened and blurred texture pack.
Stock HL2U maps relit with a custom VRAD I modified myself in order to fix Valve's most glaring mistakes and make the lights look natural