Hmm, based on those examples you linked, the newer MSI boards do appear "cleaner"
I think on closer inspection it's 80% optical illusion and 20% component reduction. MSI will occasionally use one big capacitor where the competition will use a bank of smaller ones, but actually it's probably down to silkscreening quantity and style. MSI boards seem to have much less surface silkscreening and also it's smaller/fainter.
MSI don't feel the need to plaster a logo or silly feature text everywhere either. Take the Asus P8Z77-V LK model you linked. It has large white lettering everywhere to "advertise"(?) features such as:
- Digi+ VRM
- Display Port
- EPU
- PCIe 3.0
- Gb Lan
- Lucid Universal MVP
- USB 3.0 Boost
- Network iControl
- SLI Ready
- UEFI BIOS
- DirectX 11 Support
- TurboV
- SATA 6Gb/s
I mean, wow; I'd never really paid attention but now that you made me look at it, that's a lot of pointless crap ASUS have printed all over the board!