I agree with the art needing to be upgraded, but with their largely B&W format for interior art, I can see why they didn’t spend much there. Better, more colorful art might have inspired people a bit more.I think HERO system's biggest problem is their presentation. They really keep kicking own goals when it comes to putting out new products. Instead of putting good art and pre-building things up front where they can catch the eye and the imagination they front load the books (literally) with indecipherable HERO jargon. It's no wonder the game attracts so few new players. As someone who would love to have more people to play HERO with, that bugs me.
The jargon...I didn’t find all that difficult, to be honest. At least they didn’t use the same words in several different ways. (D&D’s use of “Level” springs immediately to mind.)
The math, though largely simple, did have a couple of more difficult things they included for sake of accuracy. There was one martial arts maneuver (Martial Throw?) that asked for a square root of the opponent velocity as part of its resolution, as I recall. This was in order to calculate how well you had used your opponent’s aggression against them.