The CRTs looked better because there was more "bleed" from pixel to pixel. A great example I found to describe it was if you were in the iOS ecosystem when the iPhone 4 came out, every outdated iOS app looked terrible. The 4 had the same screen size but double the PPI of the previous generations. An outdated app looked better on a <4 than it did on a 4 because the bigger pixels of the earlier phones bled into each other more while the 4 created crisper edges that were incredibly jarring.