I've been a designer for a long time, and none of my contracts have ever paid based on the number of things I put on the screen. The design effort required to make a grid or list of data dense or sparse is pretty much identical.

(At least in enterprise software the data density typically depends on who makes the purchasing decisions. If novices and/or business folks are the ones making the pick then the software will look sparse. If technical and/or experts pick their own tools then it'll be dense and efficient.)