Great photos, Mike - I love the shot with Shoal Point!

Yeah that's Hardie Siding. It looks dumb. They could have used another kind of Hardie product, such as large panels or something.
Hardie is however a now brainer in the exterior industry these days. It's cheap, easy to install, and made of a concrete compound, so it'll pretty much last forever. You can make Hardie products can look like almost anything: wood, stucco, concrete - all painted of course. If you buy Hardie ColourPlus, you don't even need to paint it.
The person behind the decision to put up Hardie siding on the Trendwest building obviously put no thought into it, or has no creativity.

Anybody seen the new siding on the Essensia Verde building? The colours are horrific.

Hardie Siding seems like a real Langford type of thing to me, not that I have anything against either of the two. Where were the cries of "take it out to Langford" from the James Bay NIMBYs when the Trendwest thing was proposed?

Hardie siding probably has the Langford conotations for you because newer developments tend to stick to boring, bland colours - beige, beige and
more beige.
There's a lot of hardie and most people don't realize it's out there unless it's used in a beige siding in a newer development. Even sleek modern custom homes use hardie. People with old wood homes are choosing to replace the wood with Hardie, because it's cheaper to do so most of the time, and it doesn't look bad. In fact, most people don't realize it's not wood.

Port Angeles is a pretty cool town.