Believe it or not, Rob, I agree with you about the crispness in this digital age. But I think the problem lies mostly in post-processing. It’s so easy to push that clarity slider to the right and watch everything become clearer. I’ve done it a couple times with head shots of women, heard my wife gasp, and had to agree I’d probably overdone it. With one of the headshots I made yesterday I had to push the clarity slider to the left. Age has its downside. In this case, I didn’t really like to have to add the extra sharpness and turn it, as you say, into a hyper-real illustration, but the woman’s expression pretty much gets lost without it. And, yes, I understood what you were saying.
No, it’s not the Pen doing that. I made that shot with the Nikon D3. I have to assume I was fairly far across the room. The exif data tells me I was using a 24-120 lens at 85mm. This was the older 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 version which wasn’t awfully sharp to begin with.
To get away from super sharpness, here’s one from 1954 with my good old Ikoflex. Not too sharp (maybe because I shot it through the window of a train).