I'm one of those old farts who can remember the C&TS track when it was still DRGW. Good surface and line, but manually tamped "native earth" ballast for the most part. So the nice new crushed rock ballast makes a dramatic difference in the look (and historic authenticity) of the railroad.
But that's been beaten to death, and I think any reasonable person understands that this needed to be done both for safety and comfort reasons, and to facilitate mechanization of on going maintenance. C&TS cannot afford an army of workers to manually tamp dirt.
But the GOOD NEWS is I was looking at some of the rock ballast we dumped outside of Antonito back in 2000-2001. Between the effects of Weather, encroaching dirt, and weeds....heck, it doesn't look all that different from DRGW days unless you look real closely. Same comment can be made about those parts of the D&S that haven't been surfaced lately, where the most noticeable difference is not the ballast but the heavier rail.
JBWX