Think I've said it before, but the art was great & the people railing against it seem to be quite the minority. Art is subjective & you can't please everybody; Eberron having a different artistic ascetic than FR makes a large amount of sense, I immagine that if we ever see a darksun book that there will be a different art style there as well.
As to the Greater Dragonmark slapfight, it's not the big deal that some people are making it out to be & requires a bit of history to put into perspective. Eberron does not go through huge metaplot overhauls like the spellplague/sundering/death of assassin god & assassins/etc to justify system changes from edition to edition. The year is "998 YK The Present: Your Adventure Begins.. " & interpretations of things change to fit the system (despite some of what happened in 4e, that's he intended course). Back in 3.5 you'd get an absurd number of feats & had things like feat chains/bonus feats. 5e Condenses the feat changes into much more powerful feats & gives way less feats. Having the Greater dragonmark as a feat was kind of a throwback to the 3.5 days both in terms of what it did & how you got it but the feat was kind of pointless outside of some very specific & frankly subjective build choices. Now saying "I have a least/lesser/greater/etc dragonmark, that's why I can..." is more of a role playing choice like like "my warlock made a pact with $specificThing & gains power because of that". To be completely honest, greater dragonmark as it was was not a very great feat choice, it gave +1 to a stat, raised your intuition die by a notch (ranged from ribbon tokinda useful from mark to mark), & gave you two spells that you could cast 1/(usually) long rest.
As to the Greater Dragonmark slapfight, it's not the big deal that some people are making it out to be & requires a bit of history to put into perspective. Eberron does not go through huge metaplot overhauls like the spellplague/sundering/death of assassin god & assassins/etc to justify system changes from edition to edition. The year is "998 YK The Present: Your Adventure Begins.. " & interpretations of things change to fit the system (despite some of what happened in 4e, that's he intended course). Back in 3.5 you'd get an absurd number of feats & had things like feat chains/bonus feats. 5e Condenses the feat changes into much more powerful feats & gives way less feats. Having the Greater dragonmark as a feat was kind of a throwback to the 3.5 days both in terms of what it did & how you got it but the feat was kind of pointless outside of some very specific & frankly subjective build choices. Now saying "I have a least/lesser/greater/etc dragonmark, that's why I can..." is more of a role playing choice like like "my warlock made a pact with $specificThing & gains power because of that". To be completely honest, greater dragonmark as it was was not a very great feat choice, it gave +1 to a stat, raised your intuition die by a notch (ranged from ribbon tokinda useful from mark to mark), & gave you two spells that you could cast 1/(usually) long rest.
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