I'd probably agree that Ansel was not a great editor. he often trusted other people's opinions to the exclusion of his own--not just on editing but on his artistic direction. i'm not the first to suspect this is responsible for the general decline in quality of his work in the 1950s and 60s ... which is not coincidentally his period of greatest populary.

the gallerists egged him to do more of what sold, and he happily went along with it.

as far as commercial work, that's bread and butter. it's an arena where making the client happy counts a hundred times as much as satisfying your own needs for expression. if they want crap, crap they get. i pay the bills as a commercial artist myself. i'm writing this as i take a break between the morning crap and the afternoon crap. luckily, unless something goes horribly wrong in the universe, i don't have to worry about any of this ending up on a museum wall with my name on it after i'm dead.