mverta said:
When you degrain an image and do noise reduction, it tends to look very soft - smooth, but soft. When you add grain back - it's the wildest thing - it suddenly looks sharp again. It's like your brain has something sharp to focus on, so it just rethinks the image. I'll show this in action too, before/after. It'll blow your mind how adding grain suddenly makes a soft image seem sharper.
_Mike
That's so absurd, you'd think that if they didn't like the noise reduction they would just revert back to the original instead of degrading the image twice! It sounds about like what they would do though.