iN8ter
Banned
Almost that entire photo is overexposed. Look at the shadow from the tree in the background. It's almost lost to overexposure. Most of the people in that picture are overexposed with patches blown out on them (shirts, faces, etc.). The left side of the image where the shadows is looks blurry and is at a loss for details. If you knew the guy by the Stop Sign on the bike in the center of the pic, it would be impossible to crop a usable photo out of that, because the picture simply lacks detail. You shouldn't have had this issue if that was an 8MP camera. No one is asking HTC to put a 41 MP camera in their phone. 4 is just too low and too limiting with what you can do.
The second one earlier is full of digital noise (though it is lower light so it deserves some forgiveness there) and flared in the top right corner where the light is, which seems epidemic with this camera. However, that picture was composed in such a way that you could crop that off and eliminate it as a "attention grabber" and still be a decent shot; maybe.
If you want good low res photo from a higher MP camera, load it up in GIMP (for those who can't afford Photoshop/CC) and run a Cubic Rescale to 4MP from 8/13/16 or whatever's closest (aspect ratio, etc.) then export to PNG [or JPEG at 100% Quality] to prevent [most] compression loss. The photo will be smaller, will retain practically all detail of the original, but be smaller.
If HTC wanted smaller higher quality images they could have used a sensor similar to the iPhone 5S and then binned or rescaled the images down to 5MP like the Nokia phones do, or how you can do with a decent image editing solution (even Mobile software can do this).
They could have implemented that mode instead of putting resources into uFocus, Zoe, or Blinkfeed which is completely redundant with Flipboard and others dominating the aggregator market.
The biggest photography-oriented selling point of this phone is the FFC. It's a massive 5MP and actually does great quality pictures from the FFC, compared to practically every other phone on the market. I actually think the FFC is not getting enough recognition and HTC is wasting their time trying to sell something that the market has largely laughed at when they do have a true selling point that is really useful for the market to which they are positioning this device (esp. those who use apps like Snapchat, etc.).
The HTC devices also share an advantage over Apple devices in that they can do 1080p Video Conferencing form the FFC, while Apple does 720p, and the disparity is apparent if you use solutions that utilize that extra resolution (ChatOn Video Chat blows Skype/Hangouts/FaceTime away for video quality because of the resolution advantage). I've never heard them mention that, but perhaps this is because they do not build their own software to take advantage of it?