It's been a decade since I last felt real pangs of sadness about athletic shoe brands destroying the skater-owned/founded brands. The "market has spoken"; you can't cry over spilled milk; that's how it is on this bitch of an earth; and 10,000 more clishes about accepting the awfulness of reality.
At any rate, I think the new balance "N" is at least as cool looking and/or dorky as the three stripes and the swoosh - and it sits closer to the sideways "E"s of Etnies and Emerica, making them look more like classic skate shoes to me. I understand that NB's reputational whiplash from retirement home clunkers in the 90s/00s to their hypebeast turn in the last decade -combined with the fact that they were the last athletic brand to decide to pilfer the sk8 industry and thus signalled the nail in the coffin for core brands - will turn people off from them, perhaps rightfully. But they make good shoes, for sk8 and otherwise... I just think they're neat.