[Luny Tune]

7 elements in 6 groups, concave front element, sounds like a 22mm f2 lens I have.

The 35/2.8 also has that. If that means the constellation is the same, I don't know.

I've thought about it some more, and I wonder if the actual issue is that the small front element of the 35 is only a tenth if the area of the sensor, and thus that light is spread out over the sensor, and although light is dense enough to still produce a nice image even spread out to cover ten times the area, I believe that light travelling through air "wobbles" just like we can see it does over a hot desert road, and that wobble is amplified 10 times as well.
[Edit: That wobble can't be it, because the wobble is not magnified more than the rest of the image. The relation and ratio is kept the same.)

Maybe plastic today is quite fine for making optical lenses, but any small flaw or unevenness in the lens is magnified by the same factor. Maybe that's the simple explanation.(?) The image travelling through a big lens will not suffer from that, because it's not magnified as much. An image passing through a front element bigger the circle of projection onto the sensor is not magnified.

That would explain very well why it looks like "resolution" to my eyes. The image being projected out of the rear of the 35 is actually stretched and thus not of the same resolution as if it had been travelling through a big lens. And that would also explain why a 1.4 lens just automatically projects a better image quality out of it's rear, even if it's built of the exact same materials, and with (about) the same optical formula.

Obviously some of you guys know a lot more than me here, so can that be what I'm seeing?

I wonder if the "reproduction ratio" can be read as an indicator for that relationship.(?)