Ah I remember that texturing competition, it was early on in my modeling journey so I didn't have the confidence to enter.
Take a good look at the mesh untextured and then with the textures. It's the perfect example of how details put into the texture can preclude the need for detailed meshes, the mesh itself has only 936 polys.
For a professional example I extracted a fighter from a well known FPS game. The mesh has 706 polys:
First the untextured mesh;
Now with the texture;
The texture looks a bit flat because the game engine uses normal maps that dynamically adds shadows to the texture giving the appearance the model has has a much larger poly count. This is a feature that FL lacks unfortunately.