Curse the Baggins!

I've long been a defender of amateurish old school art, but even I have limits. 

While re-reading some old Dragon magazine issues from the mid-1980s, I came across an advertisement Riddle of the Ring, a Middle-earth boardgame originally released in 1977. The ad mentions that a new edition of the game, from Iron Crown Enterprises, which, at the time, held the Middle-earth license, was in the works. However, a limited number of the original edition was still available from its original publisher, Fellowship Games of Columbia, South Carolina.

The only reason I even paid any attention to this full-page advertisement is that it included examples of the artwork found in the original edition, like this:

Or this:

To paraphrase the great philosopher David St. Hubbins, there's a fine line between charming and just bad and I find it difficult to judge either of the examples of Riddle of the Ring's artwork above as anything but the latter. Maybe that's unfair, given the relatively early publication date of this game and the likely limited resources of the publisher. I understand that they're not going to look as awesome as the Brothers Hildebrandt Tolkien calendars of the same era, but, surely, they should be better than this.

Am I wrong?