Interesting thread idea.
Even though I should really be doing something else, I think I have to catch it from the start.
Dithering has a heavy influence on many aspects of a piece, and has to be carefully thought out before.
It's usually thought of as a good way to soften color transitions: not so.
In this piece, you had one hard transition indicative of contrasted light, which gave a limited but strong idea of volume.
You replaced that with 6 transitions indicative of nothing, and they're no less hard to the eye, mainly because of the flatness of the planes the pattern induces.
Additionally, the way you applied these patterns is very, very noisy.
And you didn't even gain a texture for your trouble.
The subject you chose has texture: good choice, that's one thing dithering can help with, as long as you break the patterns so as to never introduce any new unwanted plane.
Try again with these points in mind, and check the effect of every single pixel on the whole piece. It's long work!
