A tenuous defense of Ocular Miracle:

I don't think it's fair to say that this level has no merit. In fact, for the time, it's a level with quite a lot of individual merits that is weighed down heavily by only a few flaws. For starters, the argument that this level is incohesive has never really rang true with me--sure, it's not perfectly themed, but the notions of technology, sky, and space are there, and it would be difficult to argue it doesn't match the song. In this way, it surpasses a lot of levels of its era, but this is about where my defense ends.

The two largest flaws, in my eyes, are products of the time in which it was built. Firstly, this level has a lot of gameplay that is either inconsistent, unbalanced, incoherent--okay, you get the idea. I've only actually beaten Reverie, but for how fun the first half of that part is the second half fails in so many ways, and it's probably just because playtesting wasn't standard at the time. For a level with such ambitious and complex gameplay, that pretty much guarantees failure (though a lot of old levels are fun despite or because of their failings).

And while the lack of playtesting might be a non-issue for a lot of people, I don't think it's possible to look past the issue of optimization. One of the funniest relics of this level is "Memory Leak" by gecko, which based its decoration on a visual bug that was caused by Ocular Miracle overloading the game's data on some devices and rendering the majority of textures completely black. Since the level is quite literally unplayable on many devices, the various leaders of the project decided to split it into three and upload them all on different accounts so they could share the wealth of creator points. Of course, this level would have been hell to optimize, but it's still just a miserable fate for the project and it cemented this level's legacy as little more than an ambitious lag machine.