I think I figured out what some of this argument is based on (and possibly why it's getting stupider): What do you each mean as far as art and as far garbage or potential garbage in this? is it the look and feel? specific designs? design principles that are applied to everything? putting in more polygons without changing the look and feel? putting more polygons and possibly changing things because of lighting, reflectivity, how materials work, etc.? is it more about textures? can it even include textures? can it include polygon count for the sake of polygon count? what about the other things?
In game development, if they have separate roles (as they definitely did in making Halo 4 and all of the Halo games except maybe the first one), generally the programmers don't put in visuals-- maybe the UI, but with bigger teams, not even that. Speaking of which, it's only in big teams that concept artists have much separation from other artists, and I'm not sure any continuing team has ever had them completely separate-- for a video game, at least, movies etc. can be very different, but the skills behind concept art can be useful in other things. That said, I could be wrong about a lot of this-- I'd only take the word of someone who's worked as something-- a concept artist or any other particular thing-- or someone that's worked with one, or someone that knows one very well, on what it's like.
(Also I consider programming an art, but that doesn't really make a difference to anything here.)