Comparison of rough cut and final cut Front cover

This is the comparison of my final cut and rough cut of the front cover. The final cut is the image on the left and the rough cut is the image on the left.
I feel the two pages couldn't be further apart in terms of the quality, codes and conventions and how happy I personally am with each of them. I feel the final cover is just as a whole a better product and fits better with what I wanted to achieve. Now saying that I had to do what I did for my rough cut to realise how to right my wrongs and but them right. However I did not feel that I could fix the many issues I found with the rough, thus leading me to restart the page. I thought if I have a blank canvas  would be able to produce a more quality product than fixing the improvements. This ended up proving to be a real good decision and my magazine has benefited from it. The main difference between the two magazines and pages is that I based the rough cut to NME and then the final cut to MOJO. I think you can really see this from the layout of the pages themselves. The brutal truth would be that I took more care with my final cut than perhaps the rough cut but I think that is shown with the products and also the quality itself. The two images contrast massively with not only the quality of image and editing but suiting within the genre.