I never heard something about the game publishing company holding back the developers…
In fact, they are all developing a service to make business with indies dev. XBLE, PSN… They want us to work for them 
They just take their cut on sales and are happy with it.
I didn’t get access to the documentation of nintendo or sony about publishing a game for consoles and I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure there’s no “don’t be to pretty” instruction in them ^^.
There’s certainly a “make a game that works flawlessly” line, beside
If you make a photorealist game that produce 2 or 3 frame per second, you did wrong…
Those who dev for vive have such constraint : their game must run at 60 FPS to be published on steam. Valve doesn’t want that a poorly optimized game give a bad image to their technology.