I think it's completely irrelevant what comments some people post. There will always be comments like "zomfg how great" and "bah that's total shit".
It's all about the people you ask, if your friends are playing just for example 3D ego shooters like CoD and Battlefield they maybe can't really understand what's behind an old 2D RPG.
If you ask people who played lots of the old classics they will give you other answers and if you ask artists the answers will be also different. Just look out for people who like the same stuff as you and all is good. There are that many people and even if you think about some very unusual things, there are still people who like them - and this is good, because if everybody would like the same all would look like the same and this is boring.
Maybe our sight as artists is wrong, who can say that since art is completely subjective.
If you look at both screenshots you can recognize what's illustrated, that's the most important thing.
The Grindea screenshot looks with it's effects much more dynamic and game-like than adarias' mockup. You can definitely see the action there.
The Grindea screenshot also suggests more depth.
And I'd say it's by far more pleasing to look at on the first sight, like helm said, there is a path, you can imagine what is to do and so on.
The colors in adarias screenshot are fighting each other, maybe there is also a too strong contrast (purple-yellow) in the background and the charakters aren't really easy to read since the lava and stones are taking all of your attention. The charakters also don't look at each other and it's not really clear where to look at the whole screen. It's also not clear if the charakters can jump over the lava.
Maybe the parts itself are better made, but the things which you can read are much stronger in the grindea screenshot. Most people even won't recognize how the pixels are arranged, they can see it, but they won't look at it or recognize it.
But just because the illustrated things are "better" made, from an artistical standpoint there is no guarantee that the whole thing will work better. I think the big misconception about this is that we are looking at the most things as artists, not as users, gamers or whatever. We are also rating the things as artists and we are judging things by our own observation. Maybe our observations are wrong, who can proove this? Maybe we are looking at the wrong part, how do we know?
There is no problem with this as long as we don't put our own opinion above all others. It's also possible that our opinion about things changes over the years, was our earlier opinion wrong than?
Is it a necessarity that all people have to think the same as you? Even if they are friends?