I personally liked most of the old rules. The attacks didnt work. Annex was too good, and many of the others were just terrible. For example, if you had triple the icons of a city, well, that city wasn't very useful in the first place. Who cares if it destroyed, thanks for the free draw action!
The cit draw rules also were annoying, after you played the second card of an age, you had to play a city, or you just keep drawing cities.
I have not played with the new rules yet, but the flute example doesn't look quite right. Plus splaying is already pretty strong in 8 or 9 achievement games, why make it even stronger, giving a free draw? At the very least change it so you have to splay in a new direction, so you could still spam a combo of like, flute and a splay right. But no abusing flute or one of the other splayer dogmas.
I don't think the "new color" rule for drawing cities is good either. It gets you some early cities, but soon is useless, so the only way to draw cities after a while is by splaying, or re-splaying a color?
Here's a few other city drawing mechanics I thought of:
1) once per turn, remove a top card from the game, draw and meld a city of the same value
2) IMO, The old meld 2nd card of a value, draw a city worked. But to get more cities you could change it to: Any time a card is melded (even via dogma or inspire) if exactly 2 stacks have a top card of that value, draw a city of that value.
3) If you take a meld action to meld a card with a value different than all of your other top cards, draw a city of that value. (this would actually hurt many of the draw-and-meld tech up cards that are already quite powerful.)