Since the human eye cannot, unaided, see that detail and its interactions with other detail (gradations and shades) unassisted, it's really more like photography than naturalistic drawing and painting.
If you prefer that sort of thing, fine. Just don't call it "art".
If you prefer that sort of thing, fine. Just don't call it "art".
I'm not quite sure I'm really following your logic. If someone produced a painting featuring an oblique view of a particular (real world) stone wall whose pattern of nooks and crannies would defy memorization, and if the painting in fact matched the real wall perfectly, then that might be evidence that the painter used optical devices (though a sufficiently ambitious painter could get up and examine each small section of wall before painting it, I doubt any would be inclined to do so).
On the other hand, the fact that a painting shows a stone wall with lots of little nooks and crannies does not imply that the painter used optical devices to copy the design on a real stone wall. More likely, the painter knew as much about what stone walls look like as would people examining his paintings, and so he just painted an aesthetically-appealing bunch of rocks that looked like a stone wall.
One difference between good artists and most not-so-good artists is that the former are apt do be more realistic, but less accurate, than the latter. Give a good artist a rumpled linen napkin to examine and ask him to paint it from memory. You'll likely get a realistic-looking picture of a linen napkin whose pattern of ripples is a bit different from the one he examined. Give the same thing to lesser artist and the pattern of folds may more closely match the real one, but the overall aesthetic won't look as much like a real rumpled napkin.
You seem to believe that any detail that appears in a painting must have been seen by the artist in the real world, and seen from the same vantage point as he is painting. The fact is that good artists don't need to see the details in a scene while they're painting. If they need to know precisely what an object looks like, they'll examine it. And if (as is usually the case) the details aren't that important, they'll just make them up.
Incidentally, if you can find some examples of paintings which you think are good and which you know to have been traced, I'd like to see them.