It is fashionable nowadays to "dislike" the Rider-Waite. It makes one appear very sophisticated and progressive. Why bother with something like the Rider-Waite, which has so much appeal to the unwashed masses?
With a phenomenon as multiudinous as Tarot you're always going to run into elitists of every school, every deck, every reading method, whatever. I've never felt a superiority complex is worth ruining Tarot for other people.
The other thread commented that SWC was intended as a tribute to Pamela and not aiming to be a historically accurate reproduction. Reading that, I fully appreciate the Original even more. So far, Original is the only RWS variant that has both an accurate front and an accurate back. A facsimile to be sure, but an accurate one that
had been printed back then, not a new creation for the modern market. That's why I got it and prefer it to all others until we get a Pam-A with one of the original backs. If we were living in 1911, you could potentially pick up something very close to this deck. You can't get that with Rider-Waite, or Smith-Waite, both of which had commercial adjustments to their backs.
People who are looking to glean colour correspondences and other Golden Dawn mystical patterns from a Waite deck won't like the Original. But it's not meant to give you that; it's not intending to show anything magic off. All it gives is the images as certain machines would have cranked them out. It feels the least esoteric and the most "contemporary" of all of them, and that's what it wants to be: a piece of printing history.
Gawd I
hate the tartan back now...