I’m a big fan of the ASCII graphical mode for games like these for primarily the reason you state here. I think at some point I also developed a kind of aesthetic preference for it as well, especially with a nice crisp font rendering. Once you are used to reading the field of characters, relearning visual comprehension with a tileset can feel a little frustrating in my experience.
That being said, I have experimented with using the tilesets in this game a bit recently because there are quite a few that seem pretty good. One of the easiest to use for me were the RetroASCII and RetroDays sets. RetroASCII is obviously the closest, but the fact that some of the characters were different from the standard non-tile depiction was a little confusing.
One of the things that seems exciting to me is the couple of isometric perspective tilesets out there, as it adds a notably different way of looking at the map. The HitButton_iso set is really cool ( probably my favorite of all the tilesets ), the other is the ChestHole_iso set which is also very well done.
