I agree.
Street Photography is simply photography that was taken candidly and off-the-cuff. Spontaneity and genuineness are the hallmarks of Street Photography- not grain, unstraightness or murkiness. The idea of cloning something out of a Streetshot is...well just wrong. Before it was banned in China, I tried to start my own Flickr group called New Street Photography, which was an attempt to gather in all those photographers who were a cut above the norm; there are some extremely talented individuals out there producing bright, technically wonderful shots suffused with humanity and freshness. Unfortunately, very few Street Warriors seemed to understand what I was doing so they started posting shots which were indistinguishable from all the others on the web!
I even had one young guy 'advise' me how to make my shots look "real street". Apparently, clean, in-focus, well-composed shots was me getting it all wrong. With the advent of cameras such as the Sony RX1 (which I will own one day!), the image quality available to today's photographers is simply stunning. Very few younger photographers understand that the output of the pioneers looks the way it does is because they had no choice! That if you gave an RX1 to Winograd he's think he'd dies and gone to heaven. Who would buy a camera these days with no LCD and a maximum ISO of 800? No-one. So why buy all this new gear and pretend that's all you've got?

So, to bring the above round to the actual topic, for some (deluded) people at least, the historic technical limitations of equipment have become suffused with the aesthetic of an entire genre.