Okaaay... I find this map is a terrible design in several obvious ways (obvious as hurting my eyes in a matter of seconds).
* Blue colour for lands. No comment...
* Most space, and especially the main one: center, is occupied by boring useless oceans.
* Then the remaining of the central space is occupied by the largest countries: very little information there.
* The most interesting parts, i.e. where there are plenty of small countries with fancy borders (hence mostly Europe and Africa, followed by Near-East and South America) are rejected to the side.
* To add insult to injury, those parts are the most slanted and twisted.
* Finally, there are no axes clearly remarkable, no North, no South clearly identifiable, which should be the basis of describing a planetary globe. The deformations and transformations discard or at least hide every easy bit of information, no orientation is immediately possible.
So - even ignoring the colour and the point chosen for tesselation, which your first four points address, as you say this projection is bizarre as it has awful distortions (see the width of south vs North America and how the meridian lines are spaced), and the lack of navigability bought about by the twisted axis, and absence of north and south.
You want to show the globe accurately, you show a globe.
You want a better projection - turn Mercator on its side.
Most space, and especially the main one: center, is occupied by boring useless oceans.
Most of the world is, in fact, covered by ocean. This map cleverly is centered on Japan, the country that awarded the design. It appears to be fairly well proportioned and to not weirdly distort land masses that are typically wildly distorted, such as Greenland and Antarctica.
That doesn't mean the ocean has to be given prominence on a map, the same way documentaries are not dominated by silent wide shots "because most of the time nothing interesting is happening".
* Blue colour for lands. No comment...
* Most space, and especially the main one: center, is occupied by boring useless oceans.
* Then the remaining of the central space is occupied by the largest countries: very little information there.
* The most interesting parts, i.e. where there are plenty of small countries with fancy borders (hence mostly Europe and Africa, followed by Near-East and South America) are rejected to the side.
* To add insult to injury, those parts are the most slanted and twisted.
* Finally, there are no axes clearly remarkable, no North, no South clearly identifiable, which should be the basis of describing a planetary globe. The deformations and transformations discard or at least hide every easy bit of information, no orientation is immediately possible.