I certainly respect your views on cognitive design principles as this is your area of expertise, and of course we want to stay true to these principles given it is what World Learning Hub is all about.
I guess the perspective I'm coming from is looking at the e-newsletter primarily as a sales and marketing tool - and from that point of view, I feel like the current design is not as strong as it could be in terms of attracting readers to want to visit our website / make enquiries and ultimately purchase our services/products. Given this is the main marketing vehicle in Australia for promoting WLH, it needs to make a strong enough impact to drive enquiries and potential appointments for Cassandra to then translate into sales.
I definitely agree that it needs to incorporate text and not just be visual/graphical - but at the same time, attractive advertisements are rarely heavy in text and tend to lean more towards being visually appealing. For e-newsletters, I think we are competing with a lot of text formats (which are other emails being received in crowded inboxes), so therefore we need visuals to create impact and capture the reader's short attention.
Looking forward to working with Bow and seeing her ideas conceptualised in the overall look and feel of the e-newsletter.