I can understand the barb contrasts I suppose. I guess the WD design never bothered me because I'm focusing more on gameplay appearance than a render for the character screen. Still, the amazon red n gold, paladin shiny plate or sorceress green stand out a bit to me, and that's disregarding bright purple tal rasha's wrappings or green-tinged sharktooth. I'd say the WD graphics look a bit more rounded out and balanced in comparison to garish palette swaps on some old armors.
Spell effects on melee strikes I can roll with because it'll be easier to keep track of my character in the middle of hordes. Personal preference, obviously, but whirlwinding in black armor with dull-colored weapons on a gray background vs black mobs (foul dogs in act IV) was underwhelming at best. Still, spell animations themselves (frozen orb, any curse, chaos ice shards, blizzard, meteor, volcano) were pretty screen-filling. I think the changes are at least justifiable; flashy stuff was much flasher than in D1, call it a trend.
WoW comparisons... eh
vs
Google didn't return any actual images of New Tristram in-game, so I can't directly compare. Still, hearing the catacombs and torture chambers of 3 likened to WoW's Exodar, Silvermoon, or any of the other saturated high-contrast environments just seems odd to me. The only difference I see is D3 is now desaturated blue or gray, instead of gray, gray and green, black, gray on black, or brown.
I do appreciate actual discussion though.