<Paint Wibble>
Enthusiasts are fairly conservative people, we want tradition, things were much better in the old days etc etc - it's no surprise that this livery seems to have gone down badly.
Sometimes I'd play Devils Advocate and try to understand the reasons behind something that people have given their gut reaction to but... nah! It's really not a good look.
I get that marketing people will want clean crisp images, something bright will go down well with the "Perfect Curve" design consultancy. Whereas (e.g.) maintenance staff will want something simpler with dark skirts, since those are the panels that will get accident damaged - the dirt/ puddles etc will show up too.
For me, the proper Barbie livery was a big success. Clear and distinctive, but also dark skirts and a fairly simple horizontal pattern (other than the willow leaf, which gave the impression of momentum). Dark blue and white, with a splash of vivid pink to contrast - just enough wacky/zany colour to brighten the vehicle up, compared to the blue/white. Much better than the "paint the bus an overall pink/ turquoise/ orange" approach favoured by some companies - in the way that a vivid tie works with a conservative shirt/tie combination (but you wouldn't want a whole suit as bright as the tie (unless you were Colin Hunt of The Fast Show).
The next problem is the huge areas of bulky black on modern buses - look at the glazing, the windows and destination screen are enormous - so you need a colour scheme that works around this - hopefully something that works on a variety of vehicle types/ manufacturers (e.g. the First "Olympia" livery works better on a double decker Wright body, given the way that "W" logo at the back is centrepiece of the lightening diagonals). For example, the Streetdecks First has had in South Yorkshire -
https://www.flickr.com/photos/york-bus/43528170394 - dark (so that the windows/glazing/screens don't stick out as ugly black patches) but with a colourful stripe along the bottom and some kind of rising/diagonal/curve/swoosh - that's the kind of livery that seems to suit a modern bus.
Beachball was still a good livery - the main problem was that the front blue section looked a bit too dominated by the black sections of modern glazing etc - but you've got a solid dark simple horizontal skirt and a colourful at the rear - plus it was plain enough to permit branding.
These schemes though... far too messy, far too complicated - any subtlety in the middle of the double decker (i.e. the front of the "beachball") will be ruined by the inevitable advertising banners (something that First's designers forgot - nobody is going to notice the subtlety of your flying "f" when there's a huge advert for something that distracts from your oh-so-clever design work.
I know that a lot of this is about personal preference but I'm trying not to make this about "I like blue more than I like red" (or any other petty bias) - this just all feels too complicated and too bright for it to work once the freshly repainted buses are trundling around in the November rain. Concepts might look good in the design studio but I think that this is too fussy... and from a brand that had no real need to instigate serious change - they didn't have the reputation problem that First had - they haven't been taken over. Why bother with all of this?
(as long as nobody tries to resurrect Strathtay - one livery that's best left extinct!)
