Written by someone who either has poor vision or lack of visual discrimination. The highly compressed digital signals that are being sent from cable and satellite providers make pix that are filled with artifacts. Yuck.
A strong analog signal will beat those pix any day. Now a full bandwidth uncompressed HD pix will blow you away, it's so stunning. But what's actually being delivered to homes is lousy.
My understanding is that this change is mandated so that the government can re-sell the old analog channels and use them for something else. It is NOT to improve our reception.
If you're watching it on an HDTV, you're right, it can be pretty bad sometime, but down-rezzed to SDTV resolution, it should look pretty good. I know recently when I was between HDTV sets I was using the 480i ouput of my HD cable tuner box to watch HD channels, and they looked really good, as good as the premium digital SD channels.