I appreciate simplicity and restraint but I just don't get Tufte. The Napoleon chart is cool but beyond that it just makes my eyes hurt, for me personally it's really hard to digest information presented in his style.
I take Tufte as doing something slightly different than what his stated goal is. I see him more as playing with design principles to build visual grammars very different than we're used to, that sometimes run to extremes - like the Napoleon chart. The information density, compared to a normal chart, is huge and the conventions, well, unconventional. Also, it took a ton of labor, and there aren't really tools for normal humans to create such charts in the time people typically have for Powerpoint. So I see that chart, in particular, as a demonstration model, or maybe an art piece.
