i don't think 6 [garden] tiles is enough to convince me to step in the Abbot story. If i'm not mistaken, those gardens occur in the new expansions as well.
I also didn't see myself caring about the abbots (or anything else in the reboot universe) because the artwork is a downgrade and I have no intention of re-buying my collection. But I've already got a few abbots anyway because of buying extra meeple sets from cundco, and when I saw that walmart.com had the new base game for $19 ship-to-store, I decided to grab the main-color abbots. I plan to try selling everything except those 5 chunks of wood to see how much of that cost I can recoup.
Anyway, I agree with you that 6 gardens really isn't enough to duplicate the Carc II experience, which is why I said I would buy two copies. I think 12 would support a reasonable gameplay experience, even with other expansion sets in the tile pool.
the gardens with flowers in different bright colours just don't match for me with the old artwork.
I agree with you here again, and I probably should have spent a little time in photoshop re-filtering the gardens to help with that. My goal, of course, was to propose a minimal-cost solution from HiG's perspective; thus no new art to be commissioned.
Like I said, it's not a perfect solution — but I'm not comparing this idea to a mythical perfect one. I'm contrasting it with the likely
actual situation of
no more new classic tiles ever. Between those alternatives, I would choose the imperfect-but-tolerable compromise.