Generally I prefer the original f/x. It isn't that I don't think they couldn't have been freshened up but that CBS didn't do a good job of it as it looks just too contemporary and there's too much change for change's sake.
It's been mentioned upthread but I will reiterate that Star Trek Continues generally does a superb job up recreating the original aesthetic of TOS' f/x while giving us something new occasionally. Sometimes they give us something that seems a bit off, but overall it's far better than what CBS did with TOS-R. Doug Drexler created the model for STC and in an interview he talks about what he did to recreate the original aesthetic. He knows his stuff. If CBS had taken the approach STC has taken I would have been a helluva lot less critical of TOS-R.
I did say that STC sometimes does something that doesn't look right. In their last episode they added an energy effect to the agonizer that wasn't present in the original. It doesn't look right (to my eyes). I think they should have left it as it was originally in "Mirror, Mirror." I also would have prefered if the Mirror Enterprise had been the 2nd pilot version (which I think TOS-R did) which would have been consistent with what we saw originally in "Mirror, Mirror."
Another thing I think that didn't look right was the way they fired a spread of photon torpedoes in the STC episode. It just seemed off to me.
