Oh, it still takes plenty of skill. David Hockney wrote a book ("Secret Knowledge") about classical artists using a type of projection even back in the Renaissance. He was convinced Vermeer used a method of projection in several of his paintings.
I was just pointing out that there's really nothing new here. The article sounded like this was some new development, or something.
What makes Mr. Hockney's claims absurd is that many classical realist paintings are, in many ways, superior to photographs. A photograph depicts a scene as one would see it if one looked through a peephole. By contrast, a painting can represent a scene more as one would actually look at it, moving one's head around and shifting one's focus from one part to another.
While it's possible that some artists might have benefited from being able to experiment with a camera obscura, to get a feel for how certain three-dimensional shapes might translate to a two-dimensional painting, they would not have used a camera obscura directly to produce their works. Bouguereau occasionally painted people from photographs when a live subject was unavailable (e.g. if he was hired by a decedent's next of kin), but he much preferred live models. The fact that Hockney could use a camera obscura to produce some bad paintings in no way implies that good painters used such devices.