I certainly never intended it to replace the great work you've been doing, Celtic, so I apologise if it's stepping on your toes in any way. My version contains lots of changes that reflect my (possibly quite insular) personal preferences and whims so I can understand having a version that sticks more faithfully to the original BoE, and I hope you carry on with that.
The change to square tiles (not the characters, just the scenery) is just because it always bugged me a bit in the Exile games having rectangular tiles. No other reason, and others won't share my view. They're actually 48x48 tiles but the graphics are just crudely resized at the moment - I'm hoping eventually it might have a whole new higher-res graphic set.
I get your point about the scripts but I think the Python scripts in this are a lot more straightforward than BoA and there are some advantages over the special nodes such as not having to manually record all the stuff done flags and whatnot. I've not made an editor yet, there's only a program for converting BoE scenarios to the new format. Early days.
So, yes, it is a completely different direction and I hope BoE and SoE can co-exist in harmony. I'd certainly hate for it to take anything away from other people's hard work with BoE.