Nancy, turns out you agree more than I thought on first reading, but no time to edit the following much:
I'm not really talking about gaffes and lack of effects. Old DS could have been pulled off without mistakes and had reasonable effects, and it would still seem "dated", in acting, pacing, etc., to any influx of younger mainstream film viewers. It happened with Trek and Dr Who. There could end up being a competition between the tatty old show (supposedly), and the state-of-the-art, modern one. How many new Battlestar Galactica fans went on to embrace the original BSG, I wonder? That's hardly a similar situation, really, but I'll bet it would appear that way at first to many. The new one would have that surface veneer of being just so much "better".
MB, I didn't see the 1991 series, but I think it didn't do DS in a vastly different, "updated", "re-imagined" way, to have it conform to contemporary Hollywood product, and what they think mainstream tastes are. It wasn't altered to make DS mainstream, in style and content. So it didn't redefine what DS is. It wasn't a huge hit, so it couldn't have. For what I'm talking about, the new thing has to be a hit.
As far as the way we personally perceive DS, that can change too. I'm having a harder and harder time getting what I did out of old Dr Who now, after new DW has done so much to redefine it.
It matters how other, new DS fans perceive DS, if the result of the new fan influx is that I don't have the same fandom to inhabit, anymore.