Here you go.
A few people liked the old cover better. A lot of things were re-done on the album, the cover was one of the things. The response on the new cover was pretty good also.
The cover was changed for business purposes and also for timeline consistency. I know that's ambiguous but we had better control of the graphic department on the new cover and it's how we were able to make different versions for different things. The flyers, posters, and album covers all have different positioning on the letters. Because we have control over the cover elements, we were able to get a quick turn-around such as when we needed to get the posters done.
You're not the only one that commented on the mask in the same manner but while cheesy/cliche'd/etc... in the end it works out.
We also had to remove/re-do tracks because we didn't have immediate access to different elements of the tracks.
So a big thing was a matter of being able to do things with the album that we could not have done without having good control; Or it would have taken a lot more time to get things done.