It's done deliberately to reduce mipping artefacts when you are viewing from a distance What you're showing here is the opposite - your texel rate is too low for the screen pixel rate and you're getting filtering artefacts as the GPU scales the texture up. I'm not sure what you're viewing the examples in - I would…
Time to post this outside of the 'what are you working on' thread. For the most part this is done, besides a few tweeks and probably a better render. 5451 polygons and a 1024*1024 Diffuse, Normal and spec maps.
sick texturing, love the wood in particular. Great use of syncing the normal map with the specular and diffuse information, gives the scratching particular depth.