@Enriador: Thanks for your reply.
At several places in that reply and before the argument appears, that we should not hesitate to change something only because it is already working. And I am with your there, of course. We both made our contributions to move on from the webdip state of let us say 2010 which was already fully functional, as well.
However, there is a difference between improving something broken and improving something functional.
In the former case one could nearly do anything and certainly get an improvement. If unsure about the consequences one could experiment a bit, get feedback and alter the improvements.
But in the latter case, one should be relatively sure, that the improvement is really an improvement. One should try to avoid weakening the current status quo. Hence "if it ain't broke don't fix it". This should be especially important for a core variant such as Classic.
Your proposed changes seem to be a solid improvement at first glance. But this thread proves one thing: The changes, even though quite minor, are actually very controversial. And while the current status quo definitely has its own flaws, the proposed changes come with their own disadvantages, too. So we would trade one issue for another.
The proposed icons all have their advantages and flaws. This was already extensively discussed before. I would advise anybody who tries to design a new icon to look at the elaborate feedback in many of the posts before. And perhaps at some point some talented soul will design an icon that includes most advantages of the given examples but avoids the flaws. That icon, however, should probably be tested in its own variant(s) and if it really gets that popular and proves to be clearly superior to the existing ones, we can talk about the replacing them. The current ones, like the Napoleonic icons, unfortunately do not completely meet those conditions apparently.
Concerning the map, I stated disadvantages for some solutions in my last post. You (@Enriador) especially mentioned the solution of coloring all islands black. And while this circumvents the issue of coloring the islands I doubt I have to elaborate on the disadvantages to the optical appearance. But I assume this was meant ironically anyway?
A good balance between optical appearance, historical accuracy and functionality is the key. And this is, unfortunately, subjective again. Hence we should be careful of modifying something existing with a controversial alternative.
But, especially as this is very minor, there is no problem of experimenting around with the different options in different variants. You already can find a ton of those experiments in the existing set of variants.
So the given proposals while certainly made with best intents turned out to be not unquestioning suitable for the Classic variant and the current solutions turned out to be more thought out than it might have appeared at first glance. I hope that we can all agree to that conclusion and settle the original discussion about changing Classic at this point.
We can continue the discussion about coloring islands or designing unit icons with the aim to get some more insights for the design of future variants. But due to the unhealthy state of this thread it might be wise to suspend such a discussion for some time until feelings cooled down and we can constructively and respectfully argue with all of each other again.
@JECE: Thanks for your feedback. Proof-concept-concept is a good word I could not think of yesterday. Unfortunately, I am really not an expert of early 20th century cannons hence the inaccuracies.
If anyone want to use that icon for future works feel free to contact me for a raw version of that icon.