Quote - Teyon and MG - you have to say which, in your opinion,  is doing a better job at "catching the light", whatever that means. You can't just say "based on the highlights". You have say whether and which highlights you prefer or think are more accurate, which are two different points of view that a single person can choose either.

Overall they are the same at catching the light. In theory, displacement could be better, because it generates a larger surface which could catch and scatter more light, but as far as i know poser does not support raytracing with displacement, so it should be the same.

Quote - Let me be more clear, without yet saying which is which.

To me, the middle one is missing some highlights. Is that your opinion as well? To me, that is less accurate and less desirable. But you know me - accurate = desirable for me.

In the close up it does. But in the distant view i would say the outer two tiles look a bit more blurred than the middle tile, so the situation seems to be reversed, slightly.

Quote - Do you agree that missing some highlights is the same as saying "Not so good at catching the light"?

Yes, the word "missing" implies that they should be there in the first place. Missing highlights could be the result from both a smooth surface and a bad map. If a smooth surface would be the reason, missing highlights would be accurate (but not necessarily pretty). A blurry map would also miss some highlights but would otherwise be indistinguishable from a smooth surface. But (and i am taking a wild guess here about what you might have done for these examples) if you took a displacement map and converted it into a normal map, the result will always be worse and more blurred as the original map, it cannot be better than your input data. The same would be the case if it were converted the other way around. Except perhaps for the case when you convert something into a displacement map and used a too small bit depth; that would lead to quantization noise in the output and hence some more highlights. Not accurate in the common sense, but might still look better.