Nonsense! You'd be surprised what a detail occlusion pass, painted diffuse, and a well-crafted spec map can do. Everything on this page can be achieved without normals or bumps of any kind.
sweet work, but iot looks like some missed this line in the rules: No displacement maps, No bump maps, and no painting normal maps in any fashion. High res sculpting is allowed for diffuse map generation only, and retopology is allowed.