It is a significantly harder task making DF accessible than tweaking the shaders on Portal.

It's ray tracing, which is a bit more cool than shaders.

One might argue that ray tracing is a kind of shader. After all you're tracing a ray for each pixel on screen, in parallel.

Is it weird that I prefer the "before" shots in the video? The updated textures remind me of some much-worse first-person puzzle games I've attempted since Portal. Big turn-off. Wish they could have kept the original look with the updated visuals (whatever those are—I couldn't really tell, mostly just noticed the uglier textures).

Those textures don't look too bad, but I'm reminded of a game that just came out (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1730590/The_Entropy_Centr...) which is basically Portal, with fancy graphics, minus any of the good writing.

Instead of the silent protagonist they have a Marvel movie-esque protagonist who keeps doing "well THAT just happened" lines after every joke so none of them actually land.

Hah, for a second I thought you were talking about Dwarf Fortress! I would have understood that too actually, I prefer to play Cogmind[0] in ASCII mode instead of sprite mode too for example.

And I get what you mean, it's one thing to add new lighting effects, but they also swapped out textures which changes the feeling a lot more, and not necessarily for the better.

[0] https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/