Moderates from both sides of the aisle have joined the other side this election. Those moderates all comment on the direction their party is headed as a reason to "switch sides" this cycle.
Point being, I'd be careful to draw any conclusions of these recent party migrations besides the state of both parties being completely bonkers right now.
My undergrad synoptic professor (the great Jon Martin) really liked the NGM because of how it smoothed out vorticity and vertical velocity fields, so you could see the quasi-geostrophic equations in action without all of the noise from mesoscale and convective stuff. I remember when the retirement announcement came out he gave a little speech to the class about how the push for higher res wasn't the be-all, end-all. Of course this was the era when the 12km NAM was the latest and greatest, so it's hard to blame him for being skeptical of CAMs LOL.