Improving Pillar Mountains: A can of worms?

Today we added the part of Pillar Mountains that I finished improving to the game. As we ran around next to the walls, a bunch of questions started to pop up, actually filling us with doubt and dread! D:

Is this really better?

While all of us agree that the new mountains matches the rest of the game better, adding them to the game means we have to do a lot of additional work. Not only should these walls appear in every part of the Pillar Mountains, including the lower parts where you face the Black Ferrets for the first time, they're also part of Startington and similar walls are present in every cave - including the three areas that make up Mt:Bloom and its two outside entrances.

So in total, 10 whole maps that we can think of currently, plus every small cave!

On top of that, once we improve the walls, other things need to be improved as well. As you can see in the screenshot above, the bigger rocks on the playing field look a bit off next to the walls now - at the very least, they need to get their brightness/contrast adjusted to match the bright new mountain, but they should probably be repainted a bit as well. The bridges between pillars also need to be reworked, as do the houses and ideally the interior of Startington. Once you improve one thing, other old things will simply look too out of place next to them.

And so this would obviously take a ton of time to finish. And technically, I do have that time. I'm way ahead of Teddy and Fred, and I'm confident I could finish most, if not all, of this before the Steam Early Access release. But when you're about to make a huge decision like this, you're bound to be filled with doubt.

Are the new walls even better in the first place? If we could all, honestly, answer that question with a clear 'yes', then I wouldn't be writing this post right now. I'd be working on finishing more walls. But we're honestly not sure.

Let's take a look at a smaller part of the Before-and-After screens from yesterday:

Now, while the actual rendering of the new wall looks better in our opinion, it also draws your attention much more. The old one feels really anonymous as you play, and it's good in the sense that you get to focus on the actual playing field. So maybe the new walls are too distracting? Maybe remaking them isn't gonna add enough of an improvement in comparison to the workload that it'd be worth it? Maybe it'll actually be worse in the end?

We have thought of ways to solve these worries, of course. Ideas such as making the walls darker, adding vines and moss to them, having the walls consist of larger (and/or smaller) stones... As we proceed, I'll probably try some of those suggestions out and see if we can reach a point where we all agree that this is 100%, definitely, without a doubt better than the old ones.

In the end, we want the game to be as good as it can be, both visually and when it comes down to gameplay. Not knowing which path would make the better game really sucks, but that too is something you have to face every once in a while (if not all the time) as a gamedev!

What do you guys think? Is it worth getting into this, or should we simply quit this before we waste too much time? Would these changed even make the area better, in your opinion, or do you prefer the old version?