I would love to discuss with Mary about it. But I'm pretty sure she has better things to do!
And I agree with you that I don't have all the constraints. But it looks that they just used some of the default Powerpoint charts and shapes, so I just thought I could give it a humble try.
I don't understand all these negative comments. I love the re-design, and I love the general idea of re-designs.
In high-school we used to have 'focus correction areas' where our teacher would put up one or two sentences (poorly written or not) and we would spend a couple of minutes fixing them. The lessons I learned in those sessions have stayed with me, even as I've forgotten rest of the material.
One of the reasons I love Stephen Few's books and website[1] is that he takes bad graphs and improves them. You can see the before and after on the same page.
The only critique I have is replacing bar charts with bubble charts. Comparing the radius or area of two circles is far more difficult than comparing heights of bars.