I'd say most of the rankings of Louisiana as below average are fair. We can have some really good looking signage--if we wanted to. However, just like with everything else associated with state government, there's a lot of laziness and lack of care for quality.
The Good: I'm disappointed that the state abandoned Clearview, but post-Clearview BGS's actually look pretty good, as long as they don't have some sort of OCD-triggering defect..
The Bad: Inconsistency, especially among state-highway shields. I don't know why we bother with wide shields; you can fit four digits into the state shape easily, and even the extreme case of four digits, Instead, we get wide signs in lots of places we don't need them (I have a picture of a wide LA 75, FPS). Fonts are all over the place, with a lot of ugly series B on 1- and 2-digit shields. Also bad: Insufficient signing of cardinal directions.
The Ugly (literally): A) Peeling signs. You'd think that in the 21st century, we'd know how to make signs that aren't going to fall apart in our harsh summer climate. B) Series B on LGS's. We were starting to get some decent-looking LGS's before Clearview was pulled. The post-Clearview LGS's are generally hideous. (rather fitting that our current failure of a governor put up some of those hideous series B signs at the borders of his home parish.)
If we took care of the peeling and made all of the shields squares with fonts that made good use of the space, we'd be average if not above average.