I think the next thing that you might consider doing is a hack to remove the grid lines. I think that the later games proved that there was no need to that ugly UI element 
Thoughts?
Absolutely! That's one of the "rougher graphics" I've been alluding to tweak for the 20th Anniversary Edition. I've already done some proof of concept with a subset of tiles and it looks pretty nice.
The ironic thing is that the deeper I got into SFW during the final two months or so of hacking, the more I came to enjoy its graphical choices. At this point I vastly prefer its looks over Advance Wars, actually!

But still, I think I have a nice set of changes coming up.