I suppose it's a matter of taste. I absolutely hated the look of the old black dragon, the worst of the bunch imo. But it's my favorite among the redesigns. I like the xenomorph vibe and while the horns ARE bizarre I really dig the look of them. They look miles better than the old ones. Looks like they can have a few variations too, given the official artwork. But all very twisty.
Okay so this is a thing I've seen a lot and I want to respond to it here.
"This is much better than the old thing" is not actually a rebuttal to the statement made. Imagine a person with celiac disease has starved for a week, and they're given a sandwich (meaning, something containing gluten.) The sandwich is better than starvation, that's a simple fact. Yet it is also a simple fact that a meal containing gluten is still not
good. The starving person should still eat that sandwich, even though it will almost certainly give them intestinal issues, because starving is worse. But "better than starving to death" is damning with faint praise.
You like it. Clearly, for you, this is not "celiac patient chooses sandwich over starvation." But it's not a rebuttal to a person who
does have celiac saying, "I know I'm starving, but do you have any food that
doesn't contain gluten?"
You don't need to defend your liking of something. But to dismiss someone else's dislike because of the (alleged) improvement over what came before is a non sequitur at best. I am judging
this black dragon, not any others that have been drafted in the past. I would like
this black dragon to be other than what it is. It could still be different from what it currently is,
and be different from what black dragons were in the past.
But when you think about it horns on dragons make no sense in the first place. In the existing animal kingdom only herbivores have large horns - they're defensive structures. The only exceptions I can think of are the brow horns of the dinosaur Carnotaurus (which are probbly used against rivals for mates) or the nose horn on Ceratosaurus (which is more of a crest, probably not used as a weapon).
Dragons are not creatures that evolved. This argument always strikes me as profoundly silly. Even in the context of actual D&D worlds, dragons are products of divine creation. They come from intelligent design, not evolution. They can have whatever traits their divine creator wished them to have. And all of that is still subordinate to Doylist perspectives. You could quite easily invent whatever reason you like.
