The original image seems to show more detail than the ‘enhanced’ version, which seems to have lost most of the contrast.
They're trying to hide the Arctic ice. ;-)
You're just looking at the thumbnail image I posted. If you follow the links there are much higher resolution images of the pictures I posted. The reprocessed pictures are much better.
Once you have the new "full grayscale range" masters, it is dog-dumb simple to apply sharpening convolutions and do gamma tweaking to make the image for publication appear sharper to the untrained eye. The big plus is that you will have available much fine detail that was thrown away by the original post-processing...
The contrast on the original is too high -- the darker colors are black and the brighter colors "blown out." The high-contrast images look more dramatic, but in terms of actual usable information, there are more gradations in the reprocessed image.
There are different standards for scientific vs. purely aesthetic use of images. Especially at lower resolution, where you want to make the details pop. If I were cropping a "teaser" image for a Web site, I'd want to use the "before" version. But for serious study, the after is clearly superior.
One more point worth making is that the typical computer monitor only supports 256 levels of gray. It's possible, even likely, that the reprocessed image has a wider gamut, and has even more information without sacrificing contrast, when seen on a specialized display or printed out.