This is my first post in this forum...

I've played through to the end of map 3 and been simply blown away by the quality of this conversion. As far as I can tell (relying on 10 year old memories) the maps seem to be a fairly faithful recreation of the original DF maps. But Testbase on the other hand bears little or no relation to the original as far as the early outdoor scenes are concerned. Am I right or simply sad and confused?

No, you are right. It has been slightly altered, a lot of it has to do with eye-catching aesthetics, I guess. But the new team headed by DarkStarMojo is planning on making some tweaks to a good deal of the maps, I believe. He did mention doing some terrain re-vamping on the very map you're talking about; how much, I have no idea. But I am glad you are enjoying the mod. Stay tuned in the future for more to come.

I'm not 100% sure how much terrain revamping we'll end up doing myself, as things can start out small and as ideas come and go, get a lot more expansive than originally anticipated. However, what's on the table right now is mainly cleaning up the terrain models not creating entirely new areas (in other words, we'll be sharpening up what's already in the map and fixing errors but there won't be any new sections to correspond more closely to the original - and least not yet). There's also a lot of misaligned textures and underdeveloped areas that could use a sharper aesthetic eye. I got the impression that with the map changing hands a few times (three if I remember correctly) there was a bit of a rush to get things done. I felt the same way with the detention center, hence the reason I'm going to be rebuilding a large portion of that level as well.

I wouldn't expect, for the foreseeable future, that you'll be seeing something closer to your childhood memories but I wouldn't rule it out entirely by the time the mod is finished (as that's likely going to be a very long time from now ;).)