Robert Jordan's paperback books from TOR always had the WORST cover art, even by fantasy book standards. Hilariously, the book bindings were also notoriously bad and the covers would fall off, leading to the common joke that the books were trying to shed the terrible art.
I hated Doucet's cover. Yeah, I can see a hazy hypothetical situation where someone could argue it was a loving comment, but contempt dripped from it, and reeked a bit of a genuine case of "not getting it." So her statement doesn't surprise me.
For some reason I'm always surprised when I see a book using the exact same font and color scheme of another book (cover-wise).