There are a whole lot of different ways to apply seal coatings, and even chip seal can vary a lot, depending on who does it, and how they do it, and what aggregate they use. Perhaps the biggest factor is what the substrate is. Where I used to live in Indiana many of the county roads (and the ones in nearby Michigan) were not actually asphalt roads. They were well built gravel roads that in the 60s and 70s were chip sealed, directly on the gravel. You grade the road, spray on the asphalt, and put some aggregate on top of it. If you do the rolling and sweeping of it right, you end up with a decent all weather surface, though one that's a lot rougher than is ideal. I'd bet a bunch of the texas roads the original poster is complaining about are done this way, too, especially if they are (or were) low traffic. They also are very flexible, so they're susceptible to gouging and groving and frost heaving. A lot of these got paved with a real top coat of asphalt, and fall apart. A chip coat on real asphaltic concrete road is a lot nicer, particularly if it's rolled with a roller, and not just traffic doing the compaction.