Eric: Erik was talking solely about your comments apparently in favor of fewer, bigger photosites, and pointing out that this can lead to visible, undesirable consequence; moiré and other aliasing artifacts. His explanations in terms of aliasing might be engineering mumbo-jumbo to you, but the visible consequences exist regardless of the viewer's engineering knowledge.
The far more dangerous "engineering trap" is the one where people use the per pixel engineering measure of "dynamic range" as an indication of how well a sensor handles scenes of high subject brightness range, without reference to pixel count, print PPI, dithering, downsamping and such -- leading to the widespread but mostly false belief that having fewer, bigger photosites on a sensor of the same size improves the visible quality of the final displayed image of such scenes by improving its "DR".
P. S. I would bet on the usage of
(a) good prime lenses,
(b) at typically higher f-stops, and
(c) the lower degree of enlargement of the image produced by the lens used to get a print of a given size
as the dominant reasons why images from MF cameras are in some ineffable way preferred to images from smaller formats like 36x24mm by many people such as yourself.