In lieu of a Reddit account[1]...
I don't mind the ropes as much as others do. As part of the "pull up the drawbridge" it makes sense. Can I reverse the suggestion to scrap the ropes but keep the supports (rope visible along bridge-side surface, not held up, theoretically concertina-moding the bridge when the raiser-bit is activated).
Somewhere, some time ago, I did my own visualisations of how to deal with both raising and retraction (of both multitile and single-tile[2] bridges) according to my personal headcanon. I
think I never got around to posting those, I didn't want to influence things. Not sure if there's a tween-point graphic here for transition-animation, but it looks very compatible with how I think they should function.
The slightly raised version (second imgur link down, wasn't it?) doesn't really work for me. Not as a dynamic bridge... Perhaps a floor-type one that transitions to unfloored normal-ground could be assumed to be like that, for aesthetics, but we have to fight with the whole "what
is a floor" visualisation, with ⅐th/⅛th of a cell's verticality/whatever, making paved roads 'proud' (as they were, often, for construction/drainage reasons).
The desire for different bridge-types makes me hark back to Transport Tycoon (though I can't remember now how that was paramaterised... higher cost version chosen, more futurustic, the trainline/road rates for higher transit speed, was it?). I could easily see
some method of displaying (mostly as encountered in Adventure Mode) subtly different over-decorations (to the MAT-/quality-based initial variations) a cultural clue as to in whose territory/control the structure exists.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwick_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigellachie_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonar_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxford_Bridge - not strictly examples, to follow, but any excuse to show some interesting bridges of various types that aren't all just across the Forth.
)
[1] Doesn't stop my browser trying hard to open on the App I must have had installed by default on this tablet...
[2] Lengthwise, which I'd like to see examples of with the raiser-rope feature included (i.e. drawbridge-door/wall constructions).