A couple of comments. The tunnels in Ticket to Ride Europe feel rather thematic to me. Tunneling is risky business and the random element represents that risk in the game. Maybe your tunneling efforts hit a particularly rough patch or were beset by a cave in. Regardless, it feels right.

Second, having played a ridiculous amount of the original face to face and online, I would tend to disagree with the idea that you could successfully nab a bunch of long routes to go for the win. In my experience this is tough do do successfully. I can't speak for Alan, but I don't think that this potential strategy is the impetus for the change in the on board routes and tickets.

Finally, while Ticket to Ride Europe may be a better incarnation for some (I do think it might appeal to the game mindset a bit more), I don't feel that the original product has any problems. I might not be to one's taste, but that is a horse of another color.
All this aside, I'm looking forward to the new version and see it as a nice change of pace rather than as a substitute for the original.