The one case of photo-based art I really like is Ironsworn. I recommend it to all who want to see the power of well-chosen art and extremely disciplined manipulation. A lot of it looks like how I was imagining fantasy scenes when first learning D&D, except better.
My basic hang up with 5e is how often it seems to be saying no to me. Not that faction, not those clans in those ways, not that sort of chronicle, not that sort either, not those sorts of characters, not that approach to the vampiric struggle for self-mastery, etc. I like a significant fraction of what’s there, but it seems really hard to expand past the approved choices without more intensive work than I can do right now.
By contrast, I learned after the fact that at least in the Revised era, developer Justin Achilli outright hated (among others) the Lasombra clan. But he didn’t tell me all through the time I worked on the revised clanbook. He let me pitch a Lasombra trilogy when he was gathering fiction pitches, and chose it as one of the pitches to approve, and gave good guidance all through the process of writing them. I didn’t learn his take on the clan until he sent around some of his metaplot files to his freelancers, and later made some of them public.
I genuinely couldn’t tell. And on the flip side, I don’t think you could tell his favorite clans - they didn’t get any preferential treatment, mechanically or setting-wise. He and Richard Dansky and Ethan Skemp really stamped an ethos on me. I feel like V5, and even more so Hunter 5th, steps down from that a bunch, and I don’t like it.